Digitizing Your Paint: Selecting and Adjusting Artwork in Photoshop

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Dylan Mierzwinski, an illustrator and artist living in Phoenix, Arizona. In my last class, we talked all about painting. Now, it's time to bring those paintings into Photoshop to alter, shift, nudge, and perfect to our heart's desires. This is a more intermediate Photoshop course. It's going to help if you have a base knowledge of how to set up your document, basic maneuvering around the program and working in layers. This course is about two main big parts of Photoshop, making selections and then using adjustment layers to alter those selections in a non-destructive way. We're going to cover the different selection tools I love, as well as digging into the various adjustment layers that can turn our work from blah to a proud portfolio piece. Grab a notebook, sit back and let's nerd out in Photoshop. 2. Class Project: For your class project, you're going to digitize some artwork to create a finished mug with flowers in it. You can always paint your own material or follow your own idea. But if you'd like something just to get you going, I've supplied a bunch of painted artwork for you to play with. Some of it is more beginner friendly with flatter areas of gwash to deal with, while others are more intermediate with blending watercolor washes and trickier selections. Remember, the artwork that you create for my paintings is just for practice in learning and cannot be used as your own professional work. You can find the class materials from a desktop or laptop on the right side of the your project tab. You can drop any questions you have in the Community tab. You can take private or public notes right on the video player and can upload your project here. When you do be sure not only to upload a cover photo which only shows us a preview of the project, but add photos and texts to the body of the project so we can all see your glorious work. 3. Digitizing Overview Pt 1: So let's talk about digitizing, which can be any process that involves creating digital artwork from non-digital artwork. In these next examples, you'll see that in some cases, digitizing just means getting the artwork to appear digitally as it does in real life, while other times, will transform what was made on the page into something new. When you bring sketches into Illustrator, Photoshop or Procreate and draw on top of them, that's a form of digitizing. When you bring a piece into Photoshop and completely alter those pixels, that's also digitizing. When you bring a piece in and only slightly color correct it, that's digitizing. Although in some cases we'll use brushes and fill layers to create something that wasn't there, for the most part, this course focuses on the type of digitizing that utilizes the actual captured pixels to create the final digital piece. To do this, I'm going to introduce you to a series of selection tools and adjustment layers and a few other handy tools too. The first part of this class will be a run through of the cut and dry of how these tools function. The second part will be me putting it all together and actually using the tools to complete the class project. I tried to include a variety of examples and different workflows throughout the course but the big thing you need to know is the reason these tools are so powerful is because they aren't workflow specific. They can be used in endless combinations and stacking orders. I wish I could give you one formula or a set of steps that will work for each project, but it just, it's not realistic and how stifling? Instead, try to understand the strengths of each different tools so that you can begin to create your own workflow. If you find yourself asking at anytime in this course, "Couldn't she have done the same thing by XYZ?" The answer is probably yes. Well, I try to always explain myself as I make decisions, the truth is there's a lot of ways to get to the finish line, and I've developed my own preferences and favorite tools. If one tool or way works better for you, I always encourage you to honor that. This flexibility is why I love Photoshop. Be easy on yourself as your brain takes in this flood of information, and know that it's ultimately practice that will get you feeling more confident in tweaking your work. With all that out of the way, here are some various types of artwork that I've digitized that span a range of edit intensity. In the class resources, I've included a worksheet that will help you gauge how intense an edit may be. Let's begin with what I would term a basic edit. In this painting, you can see that the final version, essentially looks as it does in paper. The composition didn't change. I painted this altogether and you can see that stayed as one mass in the final. It was an easy background to remove. I didn't have a background color or anything to deal with, I just had a nice white background, although this watercolor stuff could be tricky if I was trying to put it on a colored background. Then there were only some slight color shifts that I did to make sure that it looked nice. Then of course, I added in that thank you 3K card. I composited that in because it was when I reached 3,000 followers on Instagram. This is what I would also consider a basic adjustment, even though this one was painted with a background, you can see that I left a border between the painting in the background, so that was easy for me to get in there and remove it and then insert a digital background. Again, the composition didn't change, I basically just had to adjust it so that the colors, especially, you can see the color relationships in here didn't change. Where it's orange and pink in here, it is also orange and pink in the digital. This landscape painting over here, you will actually see a little bit in the course. This I also considered a basic edit because I liked how I painted it, I only needed to make slight shifts. You'll see in the final that the sky is a little bit different, it's a little lighter in this area and the color isn't as blue, it's more of a green-blue. Then I also tweaked and intensified it. Not much had to change, I didn't have to get in here and do a lot of edits, I was basically able to use this painting as I painted it. This painting however, is where we start to get into the next, I would call it, basic plus. In this one, you can see that the final, the composition appears to not have changed, but actually it did slightly. If you notice here, these are closer together than in the final. I basically moved everything out so it could breathe a little bit better, I straightened up this over here. I think something from Amazon was just delivered. That knock on the door really scared me. The colors pretty much stayed the same, I just intensified them. This was a step up only because I did get in there and start moving things around. I had to use more selection tools and my move tools but again, nothing too crazy to turn this into a really, really pretty finished piece. Then we have these bugs. I would say these are on the same level as the last one. I changed the composition. You can see I actually have a few pages of bugs that I had painted. I started the pattern with just this one, with just these four bugs and then, the next day, I painted more of them and I ended up adding them in. This is the same kind of thing, even though I painted the background in there, I left a nice border which you'll see is going to make things easier when we bring them into Photoshop. I also, when I first painted this. I really enjoyed how this one looked with the background in there. So you'll see, I also did digitize a version that has a painted background. Again, this was pretty easy to do. I did have to do some blending around the edges to make this painted edge look nice digitally. But again, nothing too crazy and all the colors of the bugs pretty much stayed the same. So where you see this green beetle, he is also green in the final, his colors were just intensified a little bit. Nothing too crazy going on. With this one, we're starting to get into more of the power of how being able to compose your work in Photoshop can really lend itself to an exciting end result. I made this holiday pattern just from this sheet of painted motifs. Now, the reason I considered this basic is because I didn't really need to shift the colors at all. I painted the colors that I wanted to use in the final, and that made it very easy. Yes, well, the composition is changing drastically and I had to turn it into a repeating pattern. This was still what I would consider maybe a basic plus adjustment. I really just had to bring it into Photoshop, get rid of the background and arrange and size things to turn it into a repeat. Next I have this cottage pattern. This was part of my [inaudible] fabric collection that I made. You can see that in the final, again, there's not a huge shift. The biggest change is the composition. I took all of these separate paintings, I think I have more in this book, just different pages of cottages, and I painted them in a way that gave me edges that I could blend and put these together, which made it really easy. Again, while the composition is more intense, I really didn't have to do much with tweaking color or making difficult selections, especially because I painted these little sections separately and made it very easy to just get in there and mix and match and move them around as I wanted. The last one that I'll show you that kind of fits into this basic plus group is this protea pattern. It's the same as before. I painted these protea flowers in the exact colors that I wanted to use, not only values, but the actual colors. When I brought it into Photoshop, the composition was really the most intense part with getting it to repeat and be a pattern, but for the most part, it was just a really basic adjustment to clean these up, make them look nice, and then, turn them into the repeat. Now, we're starting to step into what I would say is like a step-up. Whatever is between basic plus and advanced is where we're starting to get with this pattern. In this one, you can see that the final color is totally different from how I painted these. In fact, what happened was during a free painting session one night, I painted these little guys and thought they were really cute, but I felt they were too small to use in the actual painting. The next day what I did was I painted the motifs, I cleaned them up and made them a little bit larger, and I painted them in a single color so that I could easily select them in Photoshop and then color them later. The composition is changing, we're turning it into a repeat, and now we're actually moving from single color to full color. I also created some supporting shapes. These are the fans that actually are the windmill, but you can see that I actually only painted the designs. The background of the windmill of each little windmill triangle was created in Photoshop. That's the first time in these examples that I'm creating supplemental shapes to add to my pattern. This next one is really cool. It's a wedding invitation that I did for my friends a few years ago. This is that same kind of idea with the windmills but this time instead, I painted all of these separate elements in black, including the texture. This is just a sheet that just has speckled textures on it for me to use. What I did was I ended up compiling all of it into Photoshop and then coloring it there. We're going to talk about Quick Mask briefly later on. But if you took my first Digitizing Hand-drawn Sketches class, that's the exact process that I used to create this wedding invitation. It was really nice because I was able to paint and really focus on shape and value, but was able to worry about composition and color later on. This is a holiday pattern that I made. This one uses the same ideas as before. You can see, I painted all of my shapes just in whatever color I felt like painting with that day, which was this hot pink,. I think I made this holiday pattern right in the middle of the summer. So it's nice to be able to paint with whatever color you want and then worry about what the final is going to look like later. This one became even more intense because not only did I recolor these in Photoshop, but I drew lines, line accents to be added on top later. Not only was I re-coloring and working on composition, but I also had to align all of these in Photoshop and make sure that those all looked nice. We're still kind of in this step up area, it's not the most advanced I've ever done, but this was a really nice way for me to work in order to be able to create a painted pattern at the end. 4. Digitizing Overview Pt 2: This is the last of the step up group. Let me pull this one up on my computer so I can see it. You can see this one, I ended up turning into a holiday card. The nice thing is what keeps this in this step up and not a more advanced is the colors in the end and that being very similar to the colors I drew with. This is actually marker. It's not paint. I drew in this really fun bright pink color and I liked all of the streakiness that was happening in here. I only needed to change some of them to yellow. If I needed to change these all to blue and green, maybe that color shift would have been more difficult but honestly, it was nice that all of these are separate. That way, it's easy for me to bring them in and compose them in Photoshop. I don't have edges touching that I need to clean up. These already had the black accent lines on top of them, which sometimes can make things harder, but sometimes it's nice just to have them already on there and ready to go. Now we're getting into the more advanced edits. One day I woke up and I painted this little motif, this really subtle, sweet little watercolor bunch. I wanted to see if I could paint these elements separately and then bring them into Photoshop and make a dark watercolor pattern. I was specifically trying to see how I can take something that is this light in value and how do I clean it up to put it on a dark background. The reason that this is advanced is because, well, first I painted freely and then I painted again. So that adds more time in, which is something that I'll do regularly when I illustrate it. Sometimes you just want to sit down and paint. You don't want to have to plan ahead. You just want to let it come out. This is what came out that morning. But then to make things easier for myself in Photoshop, I took a little bit of extra time and repainted those motifs separately. Also, I had to do really clean up. So I actually brought these into Procreate so that with my Apple pencil I could get in there and really clean up the edges by hand. That was my first time doing that. Then of course I had to compose and make the final repeat. This is definitely more advanced. You can see there's a bigger shift between the beginning piece and the end piece. Anytime you're dealing with watercolors that have really light values and it's hard to see the border between it and the paper, you're going to have more work to clean that up yourself. Here's another watercolor piece I did and this was actually a day that I was purposefully trying to paint really light in value. Because again, I wanted to see, is it possible to take something like this and make it look interesting, make it look good in Photoshop? Basically, I had to do a ton of work but I was able to. I'm interested now that I have a scanner, which you'll hear about the scanner, Dubaco later. I'd be interested to see what I would do differently with this but basically, I had to really get in here and not only clean up all of these edges but after I removed all of the negative space, I found that I needed to supplement it with new shapes behind it. Because you can see with this mustard background, having that mustard shine through where these are supposed to be the lighter part of the rose just really didn't make sense. So I had to clean up the edges, I had to adjust the colors to make it look nice, I had to draw new shapes behind it, I had to add texture and turn it into a repeat. Again, it's watercolor. It's not flat, nice areas of gouache, and so that makes it more complex. This is what I would consider an advanced Edit for a few reasons. For one, it's one of the first times that I paint my background touching all of those elements. That means that if I want to change the background or if I need to select any of these, I'm going to have to be more careful with getting in there and making selections. Also, there's a pretty big shift in overall color value and contrast. Honestly, I wasn't thrilled with the final result when I painted this but I was so excited when I brought it into Photoshop and was actually able to make it look nice. The areas that I felt I had ''messed up on'', I was able to fix digitally. In this case, I had watercolor washes to deal with. You can see I had some white in there that I would have to deal with digitally. Like I said, the background is touching all of this. It's all one big piece and so I have to work with it as one big piece or do all the work to separate it into separate pieces. Again, I didn't like it in the beginning. Anytime you don't love a piece, that's going to automatically make it a bit more advanced to turn it into something that you like in the end. Lastly, for our advanced paintings, I want to show you this one because not only are we doing all the things that we were doing before with having to erase a background, I'm dealing with water colors, so I have a lot of differing values in here that I'm going to have to deal with. You can see some of the petals get very light and they use the background paper as part of the flower. Yes to all of that into turning into a pattern. But on top of that, this sample area is pretty small and it's pretty strange and there are flowers that go off the edge and so I basically had to recreate this style in a way that looked really nice and natural. Then just to make things harder for myself, I drew lines that were separate, that I needed to bring in and composite on top of that and then turned it into a pattern. Then as a last nail, to make it even more difficult or advanced, is I ended up indexing the color at the end of this. Indexing is something we're going to talk about in the delivery section. But basically, if I wanted to hand this off to a fabric manufacturer, I needed to be able to say exactly how many colors were in it. That's hard to do with watercolor when you have so much variation in hue and value. Indexing is just another thing that took this edit to the next level. Then lastly, which this isn't what this course covers, but if you ever paint something, so for instance, I painted this two-page spread of these flowers coming out of this bicycle, and I enjoyed the painting, I enjoyed the process, it was a free painting, I wasn't painting with digital in mind, I was just doing my daily painting practice and I loved how it turned out and I like the colors, but at the same time, there are things that I could see that were just going to make this really difficult. For instance, where some of my painting got messier and I'd want to clean up, its overlapping other pieces. Anytime you have overlapping and all these difference in values, that's going to be more difficult. My point is that sometimes it's not always worth it for me to digitize my actual painting and I will completely re-create the piece digitally, which is what I did here. I ended up using this almost as a sketch to recreate new artwork on top. Then of course, I could always cut and use pieces that I want. So if I really liked these yellow values or these pink flowers, I could bring those into the digital composite. But my point is that sometimes you paint and you can use it and sometimes you paint and you realize, "I'm going to use it as a sketch." Lastly, I don't think it's necessary to always be thinking ahead to the digital end product. Like I said, especially if what you need at the time is freedom in your creativity, when your heart's calling for freedom and expression, mama, just do that. But if you know ahead of time that you're going to be using your work digitally and you want to plan ahead, here are some things that can make the process smoother. Firstly, paint as closely to the final as you can, or like I said, you can paint freely, just let your creativity come out. But then if you want to, you can take stock and repaint again for digital, if it's going to make things easier. I would recommend painting in a solid color or at least color families or relationships that work, even if the hue or general value is off. For instance, I don't want to use a painting where the highlights are in the wrong spot and the dark shadows are in the wrong spot because no color changing is going to correct that. It's already wrong to begin with. I would say you can also work out your color before you even pick up your brush. If you guys watched my last class, you know that I love this. I love planning before I get to the work because that makes it more enjoyable for me. In Illustrator or with markers or with anything you have, you can actually just work out what colors you want and then sit down and paint those. That's going to make things easier for your end product. Similarly, you can paint elements separately. You saw in a lot of those examples that I'm compositing items that were painted separately into a new composition. Another idea is you can capture the artwork before painting in a background, or you can leave a border between the background and the motifs, or you can paint the background separately, or you can have a very clean and stark borders between the motifs and the background. Basically, just try to consider the background. Sometimes I'll just take a picture right before I'm going to paint it in or scan. That way, I've got it. I want to have a background in the painted piece but not in the digital version. That's a nice way to do it. You saw in the examples that sometimes I left that border between the background and the motifs. You could just paint a whole background separately and scan that in and then like I said, or just have very clean or stark borders between the motifs and the background. Then lastly, just consider the paper that you're using. Very textured cold press papers are going to give you a bit more work with cutting out the backgrounds and making motifs look natural on colored ground's a little bit harder due to all of their heightened texture. 5. Selection Overview: Before we jump into the actual tools that will help us make selections in Photoshop, let's talk about what selections are. They are a super basic building block in Photoshop, so basic that I find that as I try to speak through this, I make it sound a lot more complicated than it is. Fear not, this is something that I'm going to build on in this course. So all of these things, this isn't the first time and last time I'm going to talk about them, we're going to come back to it. So don't worry, just sit tight, let it all come in, and hopefully it will build on itself as the course continues. But anyway, let's talk about what a selection is. A selection is just a way to have Photoshop focus on a certain part of the canvas. I'm just going to drag out a basic selection here that is a square. We can see that the main thing that has happened is I now have these marching ends, this moving dashed line, that is telling me that this part of the canvas is now what Photoshop is paying attention to. Now, any command that I do, whether I cut and paste or whether I fill this with a color, this is the area that Photoshop is going to manipulate and then the layer that I'm on is where that manipulation is going to take place. For example, if right now I wanted to fill this selected area, so I want to color it in with my foreground color, I'm going to do that by hitting Option or Alt-Delete on my keyboard. Sure enough, this area that I had called out with my selection got filled in and it happened on this layer because this was the layer that I was on. To deselect, so you can see my selection is still active, my marching ends are still moving, I'm going to hit Command or Control D, or you can go up to select and deselect, and now I no longer have those marching ends. But you can see that I was able to make a blue square within that white square. I'm going to hit Command Z a few times. It's Command or Control Z to undo once and then to continue to undo, you're going to do Command or Control plus Option or Alt, and then Z. You might have different undo settings in your keyboard shortcuts. You can go to Edit and Keyboard Shortcuts. I'm going to go to Edit and undo and then this is the one that you want is step backward. I believe that the newest version of Photoshop had a different default for this and you just continue to tap Command Z in order to step backwards. I was used to the old way in which Command Z will undo and redo a single step and then Option Command Z will continue to step backwards. That is not the point, but I do want to mention that because it's super annoying if I am doing something and it's not happening for you on your screen. So this is how I have my keyboard shortcuts set up. It's set up like traditional Photoshop had it. Anyway, so I stepped back I no longer have that blue square filled on this layer and with the same selection selected, I'm actually going to make a new layer and I'm going to do the same Command. I'm going to hit Option or Alt Delete. And essentially visually I'm going to hit Command D to deselect. I have the exact same result, that area that I had made a selection and is now blue. Except for you can see over here that since I changed the layer I was on, I actually was able to fill an area of a brand new layer, now these guys are totally separate. That is truly basically what a selection is. It is a way to isolate or call out an area of our canvas and then based on what layer we're on, it's going to manipulate the pixels in that area. You can make selections without ever touching any of these tools. In fact, two of the easiest ways to make selections is to Command click on the thumbnail layer. So if you don't see a thumbnail that's as big as this or you see no thumbnail. You can right-click in this area and I get in my menu right here I can see no thumbnails, medium thumbnails, enlarge thumbnails. There's also this option to clip thumbnails to the layer bounds, which I really like. So you can see right now this thumbnail is showing me that this entire area is blue. But if I look at the canvas, that blue area doesn't take up the whole layer. That's because this thumbnail expanding to show me only what's on this layer. If instead I say Clip thumbnails to document bounds, you can now see a better representation of what we're looking at. I switch my views if I have a really big canvas with a lot of tiny stuff on it then this view isn't going to help because I'm just going to see a tiny blurb in this corner and I'm not going to know what that is. But if I clip the thumbnails to the layer bounds then I can see exactly what pixels are on that layer, and it makes it really easy. But anyway, this Command clicking on the thumbnail layer is a really powerful way to quickly make a selection of active pixels on a layer. When we're talking about basic shapes and flat colors like this, yes, you can quickly click those, but there's also a 1,000 other ways to quickly make that selection. Where Command clicking becomes powerful is when we have very intricate flower selections that we've made. Or if a flower is on its own layer and we really just want to select where that is. It's super easy to just get in there and Command click. So I'm going to Command D to deselect. Another easy selection you can make is just to select your entire canvas by hitting Command or Control A, or going up to Select and all. You can see that what that does is it's going to throw the marching ends around my document bounds. Now if I hit Option or Alt, Delete, it's going to fill this entire area with blue on this new layer and I'm just going to hit Command Z to undo that. I'm going to hit Command D to deselect. Now a really cool thing that we can do with selections and this is where they become very powerful, is we can add to and subtract from them. So I'm just going to make some shapes here. Don't worry too much about what I'm doing. It's just for example purposes, actually, you know what? I thought ahead and already made one. Here we go. So let's say that I just want to select this blue area right here. Well, I know I can get pretty close with my Marquee Tool. Going to grab my rectangular one and I'm able to make a selection that's pretty close. I was definitely able to get all this blue area. But as you can see, I don't want this overlapping area in my selection. I just wanna be manipulating these pixels that are blue. In order to do that, I'm going to need to subtract from this selection because right now the selected area is covering too much. I don't want it to cover here. If the case were that I wanted to actually select this as well, then I would need to add to the selection because right now the selection is not big enough to encompass this area. All of our selection tools, whether I'm on the mark keys or the last nodes, or the magic wand tool. You can see that these icons are staying the same at the top for each set and that's because these election tools can be used in combinations. So I did this original selection with the Marquee tool, but now I'm going to select, or I'm going to subtract from the selection using a different tool. Because if I were to subtract using the Marquee tool, you can see I'm just getting more perfect rectangles. If I subtract this rectangle from the current square, I'm just going to cut out this whole area and really I want this nice blue curved line to be part of my selection. So I'm going to hit Command Z to undo that and now I'm going to use a different tool to subtract from this selection. I know we haven't gone over these tools yet, but just bear with me. Right now it automatically went to add to selection and you can use these buttons if you want, if it's easier for you to remember whether you're adding or subtracting. But I personally like to use the keyboard shortcuts to switch between adding and subtracting. If I hold down shift, you can see that I get a little plus sign next to my magic wand tool. If I hold down Option or Alt, You can see I get a little minus sign, which means I'm subtracting. I want to subtract from the selection, so I have the minus sign. I'm going to click once here. The magic one tool is going to do its magic to subtract this area of dark blue. Now sure enough, the marching ants are going perfectly around this blue area. So now, you know, if I wanted to alter the color, I'm able to do that without affecting any of the other pixels in the screen. I also, as I alluded to in the beginning, there are lots of ways to do things. So I could have also made that selection by Command clicking on this layer, which just Command clicking once, which selected everything. Now I could go ahead and subtract these other shapes from it. So I'm going to hold down Option or Alt, and I'll first get rid of the yellow and then I'll get rid of this dark blue and I end up with the same selection. So like I said, there's lots of ways to get to the final result here, so don't get too hung up on that. The point is just to pay attention to this is what selections are. Selections call out an area of the canvas and then based on what layer we're on, that's where the manipulation is going to take place. Once a selection is made, you can add to it. You can subtract from it. You can save it, which we'll talk about in a second, and you can actually inverse it. So let's say that I wanted, right now I have this yellow area selected. I'm going to go ahead and add this dark area and this blue back in. So basically we have everything on this layer selected. Well, let's say I wanted everything except these selected. What I can do is just inverse the selection. Right now, just to show you that I do have these selected, I'm just going to fill this area by hitting Option or Alt Delete on my keyboard just as a temporary tests to see yep, this is what I have selected. I'm going to hit Command Z. Now so that I can select everything else, I'm going to inverse that selection. So I'll go to select an inverse. It's the keyboard shortcut of Shift Command or Control I, which is, I use it a lot and at first it looks like nothing is different. We still see marching ends moving around this shape. But really what has changed is now we also have the addition of these marching ants going around the outside, which tells us that actually everything out here is selected and these are not. Again, if I do a temporary fill just to check, you can see in fact that is what happened. It inverse that selection. I'm going to hit Command Z. and if i inverse the selection again and do a test file, you can see that it's switched and did the opposite. So inversing is a super powerful way to use selections that you've already created in order to select the opposite. Lastly, I want to show you that you can save selections. So again, when we're dealing with basic shapes like this, it's not like these selections are so difficult to make that, you know, it would be a headache to recreate it. But once we get into digitizing our paintings and you're making these really intricate selections of your flowers. You're not going to want to do that every time you want to select or call out the pixels or manipulate the pixels in that flower. So if you want to save a selection once the selection is made, so you can see my marching answer active. You can go to select and Save Selection. The way it saves it is through a channel on your current document. Don't worry too much about channels, to be honest. Channels are still something that kind of allude my brain. I kind of sort of understand where they are and what they do. So don't worry if you if you don't know, that's okay. All you need to know is you need to name your selection. So I'm going to call this circle and square combined, I'm going to hit Okay, and I'm going to deselect. So let's say it's further down the road. I've added a bunch of other shapes and I'm like, oh shoot, I really need to select just this circle and square and I don't wanna do it again. I can go up to select Load Selection. And then from my drop-down, I'm going to see that circle and square combined that I just made. I can hit Okay and it's going to automatically load that selection for me. Alternatively, since it is just a channel, you can go to your Channels Panel, which if it's not up here, you can go to Window and channels. And then you can see down here are some selections that I've saved. To load them, just like on my regular layer, remember how I can Command click to bring those up. I can do that with my channels too. So I could find where that circle and square combined as I can hold down Command or Control and I can click on that layer on this channel to load that selection in there. So that's it, that is what selections are. They are very basic, but super powerful. They're sort of deceptively simple. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's actually take a look at what the different selection tools are and how they work. 6. Selection Tools Pt 1: Well, let me introduce you to our selection tools. We're going to start with our Marquee Tools, which you got a little familiar with in the last round, and they live up here. Do you see this tiny little carrot and the bottom corner of this tool? That means that if I click and hold, there's actually more tools that live under this fly out menu, you can see that this is where our Rectangular Marquee and Elliptical Marquee Tool live. If you also notice they have the same keyboard shortcut of M, so how do I differentiate between which tool? To access tools that have the same keyboard shortcut, you are going to hold down Shift and then tap the keyboard shortcut, go ahead and pay attention to this icon up here. Right now I have my Elliptical Marquee Tool selected, but if I hold down shift and tap M, you can see it changes to the Rectangular Marquee, and if I tap it again, it switches back, that is the way to access tools that have the same keyboard shortcut. We're going to start with the Marquee Tool, and as you click, and drag, it's going to drag out rectangles, if I hold down shift, it's going to constrain those proportions to keep it as a perfect square, you can hit command D, you can hit shift and the switch to my Elliptical Marquee Tool, as I click and drag, of course, I get some ovals, and if I hold down shift, I get a perfect circle. If you start to drag a selection out, like see how I'm getting a perfect circle, but it's not lining up with my actual circle. While you are making a selection, while you're holding everything down, you can also hold down space bar, and that's going to give you the ability to move the selection. I'm going to let go of space bar while still holding down Shift and my track pad, and I'm going to keep moving and adjusting that until I have that over top, those are the Marquee Tools, very basic. Next we have our Lasso Tools, which all have the keyboard shortcut of L, and if you ever used Microsoft Paint back in the day, this is the OG, I've seen this icon since I was a kid when I was first learning computers, and it's as basic as it gets you clicking you drag, and Photoshop will make a selection based on exactly where you clicked and dragged, it does not smooth out your lines, it does not care if you accidentally got bumped and made a mistake, it is going to record all of those mistakes and all of those bumps, I am going to deselect. If I begin to make a selection and then get interrupted and let go, Photoshop is just going to connect my first point and my last point with a straight line, but then as you know, we can add and subtract, so if I did make that mistake and I sneezed or something and let go, I could still get back in and begin adding to my selection, to finesse it and get it where it needs to be. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Command D" to Deselect, and I'm going to hit Shift and Alt to get to our next Lasso Tool, which is our Polygon, or Lasso Tool. This one does a little bit more work for us and that I no longer have to click and drag, I just have to click once, and I get a point and then I can move anywhere to set my second point, and Photoshop is going to do the work to keep those lines perfectly straight in between the points, this is a nice way to get a very straight selection. If I wanted to use this tool to select this square, I can ensure that I'm getting straight lines by clicking, and then if I hold shift, you can see it constrains me from going perfectly horizontal, perfectly vertical or at 45 degree angles. Cycle, hold down, shift, click to drop a point, hold down, shift, click, click, click, and now I've made a perfectly straight edge selection with one of my Lasso Tools. Going to go ahead and hit "Command D", and our last Lasso Tool, I'm going to hit shift l to get to it is our Magnetic Lasso Tool, so just like the Polygon Lasso Tool does a little bit more for us than the Regular Lasso. The Magnetic Lasso Tool does the most for us out of the Lasso Tools and that it does the heavy lifting. What it's going to do is once I click and I dropped my initial point, I'm just going to trace my cursor, over the edge of where I want that selection to be made, and Photoshop is going to use its infinite wisdom, to take a look at where the border is between these two objects by looking at contrast and value and hue, and it's going to decide where those points go. I'm going to go ahead and get started, and my goal is to trace around the whole exterior of these overlapping shapes. I'm going to click to drop my first point, and I'm going to move down the edge of this circle, you can see that if I accidentally go too far in or out, it does a pretty good job of jumping back and sticking true. It'll basically override any bad decisions I make or it will try to if I'm moving slowly enough. As I get down here though, I'm meeting an intersection of color where there's a lot of different ways that the Magnetic Tool could read this and it might not know that I want a hard corner here, so at anytime I can always drop manual points. I know I want a hard point right here. I'm just going to drop it. I'm not going to leave it up to Photoshop, to guess, and then I'm going to continue on my way. If at any point you're using a selection tool and you run out of screen or you run out of Trackpad, you can hold down shift to activate your hand tool, and that will let you pan around your document., but beware, as soon as you let go, you're right back in that Magnetic Lasso Tool lands so you don't want to accidentally, bring your cursor out like this because then you're going to add all those points that you don't want, I'm just going to hit delete to get rid of those, come back up here and keep moving on my way. You can see it's doing a really good job. It's also pretty time consuming for me to move around all of this, especially for a shape that's so basic that we could select and other ways, but you can see that if I start to move too fast and I don't give Photoshop enough time to react to what I'm doing, it's selection becomes a little bit sloppy joe, because it was doing its best to keep up with me, and so where we were slow, do you see how nicely it hugs those lines, but then as I got faster, it got sloppy. But I could go in with my add to and subtract from selection tools to clean it up, let's do a little quiz right now. If I just want this area selected,how do I need to adjust this selection? Do I need to add to it or subtract from? Well I can see that the selection is too big right here. It's actually selecting past what I want it to grab, and so I would need to subtract from this selection. I'm going to hold down optional alt, and I'm going to click to drop my first point, and I'm going to trace a little bit more slowly here. Now, this next part is, one of those things that's not complicated, and yet it took me a bit to get used to, I basically, need to loop my cursor back around to that first point that I made, in order to finish off this selection. Now if I cut into the yellow, then I'm going to be subtracting all of that from the yellow selection, if I go down here, you can see I just made things worse because I actually subtracted all of that yellow area. Yes, I cleaned up this line, but I cut into it. What I needed to do instead, was trace down this area and go outside, and click, and that was able to subtract, anytime I'm subtracting, I need to make a shape outside here and then refined the edge in order to clean that up. Let me go along here, and it's just like before, this is where my subtraction ends, and I'm going to come out here, and fix that. Now down here, we don't need to subtract from the selection, the selection is actually too small. It's not big enough to grab all of this yellow area, so we need to add to it, so same thing, I'm going to click and I'm going to drop. This time I'm adding to the selection, I don't have a minus sign, I have an add to, but instead of going into the white area, because again, we don't want to add white. We want to add in these yellow pixels that were missing, I'm going to cut into this inside area to get back to my first point and click and that cleaned it up. Remember, you don't have to keep using the same tools, so here I have a straight line, it probably makes sense to use the Rectangular Marquee or the Polygon, or Lasso Tool to clean this up. I could use the Magnetic Lasso again, but I think it's going to be faster if I just grabbed my Rectangular Marquee. I want to first trim off the selection that's hanging off, that's too big, I'm on subtract, I'm just going to line that up to cover all the places that I want to subtract from, and then you can see my selection, got a little skinny here, I need to bump that out so that it selects all that blue I need to add to the selection, so I'm going to hold down shift, and in here, I'm just going to make sure that I'm covering all that area that I want to be selected. Those are Marquee and Lasso Tools. Next, let's talk about our Magic Wand in Quick Selection tool. I know this isn't a beautiful piece of pizza clip art, but it's really going to help demonstrate how these tools work. The Quick Selection tool and Magic Wand live together and they have the keyboard shortcut of W. Both of these tools use contrast as a way to figure out where the border of the selection is going to be. I'm going to go ahead and let's say that I want to select this crust. I want all of this crust to be selected. Using my Quick Selection tool, I can start in the area that I know I want. What I'm going to do is I'm going to be in clicking and dragging. If I let go, you can see that Photoshop has begun to make the selection for me, I didn't have to drag my cursor around all of these bounds, I really just set a small area within this crust and it was able to determine based on pixels that are similar enough to where I started, where my border will be. What it's doing is as I'm moving along and pushing my cursor down, it's looking for more pixels that are similar enough to this color brightness value, all of that to include. Notice how I have a really nice border happening here between this red sauce and the crust, and that's because there's enough contrast there that the Quick Selection tool knows that as I'm dragging along, that this is the border that I'm probably working within and trying to select. Right now, I'm still clicking and holding down my mouse. Do you see how the selection looks messy? Well, as soon as I let go, it refines and snaps that back in. So don't worry too much if it looks crazy when you're first clicking and dragging. Now, as I zoom out, I can see that I was able to select all of that crust in a few seconds just by clicking and dragging. If I were to cut this out, so Command or Control X, you can see I did in fact, get all of that crust. There was a little bit leftover. But for the most part for broad strokes purposes, you can see that I was able to grab all of that area. Now, the Magic Wand tool works very similarly, but instead of clicking and dragging, you just need to click to set your point sample. Your point sample is basically the sample pixel that Photoshop is going to use to make decisions of. I go ahead and click on this ocher color here, that ocher color became the point sample and Photoshop said, "Okay, what are the pixels that are similar enough to that, that are touching this pixel that she probably wants selected?" You can see that it did a good job with one click going all the way around the pizza and grabbing a really clean border between this ocher and this red. But you can also see that it excluded a lot of these darker pixels. That's because these darker ones started to get too far away from our point sample. The thing that determines that is our tolerance. Our tolerance is saying literally how much deviation should we tolerate on either side of your point sample? If I turn this down, let's turn it down to 15. That means that less deviation from my point sample is going to be included in the selection. If I click this ocher color now, you can see I'm even getting less of a selection. It's selecting less of these red pixels because it narrowed the scope of what pixels it would select. If instead, I hiked this thing up to 80 and I select the crust, well now, not only did it grab all of that ocher and all of the edges, but it started to creep in on this red here. That's because I opened up that tolerance so much. So it said, "Okay, well, technically, these red pixels and these darker red pixels over here are within the tolerance of your point samples so you must want them selected. Tolerance is just something that you'll have to adjust and go back and forth with. Let's see, and I think 35 is the default, and so I'll click that. 35 is getting me a really nice selection here around this red, but I'm still missing some of this ocher. Now, what I can do is I can either hike up the tolerance and re-sample it altogether, or I can just add to my selection by adding another point sample. So I can hold down shift to add two. Now, we're saying, "Okay, well, don't only select the ocher pixels that are within this tolerance range, let's also select these darker ocher." I essentially just gave it two point samples to look at. It was able to grab all of this, and it was able to grab these darker orange colors without getting too far into the red. It's a balancing act between shift clicking to get all the point samples you want to add to the selection and adjusting your tolerance to get it where you want it. Let's see if we can do it just with tolerance. Right now, my tolerance at 35. Again, we're getting a nice border with the sauce, but we're missing some of these back here. I'm going to hit the select and turn this up to 45. Again, getting closer, but we're starting to creep in on that red. This is an example of where you would want to use a combination of tools because the Magic Wand tool on its own might not be able to adequately select all this while not selecting the pizza sauce. So that's just an example of how these tools were combined to work together to be really powerful. The other cool thing about both of these tools is so far, if I go to Magic Wand, we've had this contiguous box checked up here, which contiguous means pixels that are touching each other. When I'm clicking here, I'm telling Photoshop, "Okay. Here's my point sample. I want you to select pixels that are similar in hue and value to this ocher. The tolerance is at 45, so you have a pretty good standard deviation on either side to pick up pixels that are a little bit lighter and pixels that are a little bit darker. But still, the pixels have to be touching each other. As I click here, you'll notice that it's only selecting the pixels in this crust, even though there's ocher here, there's some ocher in the crust, we have some other yellows, why isn't it selecting those? That's because it's not touching them. We have this big sea of red that is dividing these colors from each other. Whereas these ones, even though they go all around the pizza, they're all touching. If I uncheck contiguous, and actually, let me do that as an example with red instead of the ocher. Right now, if I click on this point sample, even though this red shows up in the pepperoni, it's only going to select this area because these pixels are touching each other. They're isolated away from these ones. If I uncheck contiguous, it is then going to select any pixels on that layer that fit within that point sample and tolerance. This time, when I click the red, you can see that it actually started to grab more of the pepperoni. Even though they're not touching, it was like, hey, you wanted all the red to be selected. Here's all the red that we found within that tolerance. Again, I could either Shift-click if I wanted to add more of these colors of red in there, I could shift-click until it looks like I have all the red, although it looks like I started to get too much of the crust there. Or I could turn my tolerance up and hope that when I select red, it then knows to grab all these pepperoni. It did. It grabbed all the pepperoni, but again, it grabbed some of the crust. Just as a mini quiz or as a solution of what I could do here, if this were real life and I finally got all the red that I wanted selected but I also had this extra stuff, I would just use my Lasso tool, my regular one to subtract all these areas. You can see in here, I don't want these pixels selected, so I'm just going to use my Lasso tool to do a quick draw around those. You can see the Lasso tool is really helpful to use when you don't need accuracy, you just need to quickly grab a custom area. I'm just moving around. I want to be careful to stay out of that red area because they don't want to subtract the red that I want to keep. I just want to subtract this red that got accidentally selected around the crust. That looks good. All of my red is selected and I was able to do it with a single click with the Magic Wand tool and then, I'm subtracting extra accidental pixels that got selected by using a different selection tool. 7. Selection Tools Pt 2: For those of you that took my Illustrator basics class on the pen tool, the Photoshop also has a pen tool, the keyboard shortcut is P, and it works very similarly. If the idea of having to deal with the pen tool again just gave you shivers, don't worry. Even though they work similarly in Photoshop and Illustrator, my need for the pen tool is much less and less heavy than when I need an Illustrator. I find that there are just specific times that it's really nice to have it. For example, this painting of this mug, I really like all the variation and value here. I like this bleeding of color, I think it's really cool, but my overall border here between the paper and the paint, even though that's a nice clear border, that Photoshop would be able to probably separate and clean up for me, the mug looks wonky. I just didn't do the best job painting it, I did a fine job, but not the best job. I want this handle, but I don't want this handle to be cut out exactly as I painted it because it's messy. Instead I can use the pen tool to go ahead and use bezier curves to create a cleaner selection. I'm going to go around and the pen tool works by clicking and dragging to lay bezier points that you can then drag out bezier handles to make curves for. I'm not going talk too much further in-depth about this because you don't need to know much more than that. If you want to know more about the pen tool and how it works and why all these handles are weird and where the points go, I do recommend watching my Illustrator basics course on the pen tool, even if you're not going to use Illustrator, but just because it gives you an idea of how the pen tool works. I will say that one thing you'll want to know is these handles are dictating what this curve looks like, and so right now, this handle on this left side is helping to make sure that this curve right here is really smooth. This handle is going to affect the next part of the path that I have not yet drawn. As I click here, you can see I get this really wonky line that I don't want. That's because that handle is dictating it. If I don't want that to happen, I can go ahead and hold down option or Alt and click on that last point, and it's going to keep this handle intact, which is going to keep this line nice and smooth, but it's going to give me a fresh corner point to deal with so I can just get this right where I want it. Now, one thing to point out is, since I broke those handles, this is going to have a little corner to it. What I can do is, I can hit A to get my direct selection tool. I'm sorry, I want to do Shift C. I don't, I'm sorry. I just got so used to my illustrator tools that I forgot what I was doing. I'm going to go to my pen tool file and go to "Convert point tool", and I can go in and I can re-drag out how I want these handles to look. If I want to do them independently of each other, I want to smooth this one out separate from the other, I can hold down option or Alt to just affect one handle at a time. Not holding down option or Alt, do you see how I'm changing that curve on both sides, but if I hold down option, I'm able to just affect this, and then just affect this. I just made it sound so much more complicated. It really is not that big of a deal. I'm going to delete everything I did and I'm going to click and I'm going to move around this handle and I'm going to try and just get a really nice smooth shape that's going to suit my mug better. Again, I hold down option and clicked on that point to make it clean. I'm just going to continue my way around. Now, when I have completed my path with my pen tool still selected, I can right-click on one of these anchor points and go to make selection. Now you can see I have a selection exactly where I had laid my pen tool out. What I'm going to do in this case is I'm actually going to create a layer mask from that selection. What that just did was it hid all of those pixels by putting a mask in front of them. You see now we have this layer mask on here, and that's this guy that has this little chain here. Layer masks are always going to show in gray scale. This thumbnail is showing the artwork that lives on that layer, and this mask is showing what part of the layer is actually being shown and which part is being hidden. Wherever you see black in here is where the pixels are being blocked. The pixels still exist back there. If I go ahead and disable my layer mask, you can see it's not like I deleted all of that information back there, is literally just masking it. I was just making it so it appeared that it was not there. If I enable that again, you can see I have a nice clean background between my painting and the actual background. I have some more work to do though. You can see that if I change the background of this, that I need to cut out this area where there's still paper in there. I can go right back. I'm going to grab my pen tool and I'm going to cut this out. That's pretty close. I know I didn't get it exactly, but I just want to show the example. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to make a selection. I'm going to hit "Okay". Now, instead of dealing with the actual artwork on this layer, do you see how there is a square around this layer thumbnail? That means that right now, anything I do to this selection. If I go in here and use a brush, it's going to happen right on that art layer. Instead, I want to be affecting the layer mask. I want to affect which pixels are showing. I'm actually going to click on this thumbnail and you see how the square is now around the mask. That means that anything I do out here now is affecting the layer mask. Even though my foreground color is black and I just painted with it, I didn't drop a big blob of black right there. Instead, I painted black in the layer mask, which meant that any pixels that were showing right here on my mug are now just hidden. This is the beginning to a non-destructive workflow because I'm able to get the effect that I want, I'm able to still have a clean selection from this mug. But if I made a mistake and I cut too far in, or as you can see here, I didn't cut enough out. My mask is always there and editable for me to go back and forth. If I paint with white, you can see it's going to bring those pixels back in, if I paint with black, it's going to mask them back out. Layer masks are super important. We're going to talk about them a lot. I would say if it's one of those building blocks that you still haven't grasped, I would go and look at some of Adobe's documentation about them. Maybe watch a few YouTube tutorials because masks, they're so powerful and I know that they tripped me up when I was first starting. I understood the basics that black blocked things and white showed things, but I still I couldn't conceptualize how to use it. One last thing while we're talking about masks, right now, I was using stark black and white because black will fully block pixels and white will fully show them. But that means that any shades of gray in between are going to be dealing with this sort of translucent showing. I am on my layer mask thumbnail, not on my artwork thumbnail. I'm going to go in here and start painting with a gray. You can see that it's neither blocking nor showing the pixels all the way. It's doing a sort of in-between and that's because this gray color on this layer mask is only partially showing the pixels that are on this layer so that can be helpful. I'll show you how that can be helpful later when we're painting, but for now you just need to know that black is going to block pixels that are on that layer, white is going to show pixels that are on that layer and shades of gray are going to play with the opacity of those pixels in that layer. One more thing before we move on is the pen tool and lots of the selection tools you'll see have an option for feathering. Let me just try and get in here a little cleaner and make my selection. You'll see that it asks if you want to feather the radius, and right now it's at zero pixels, so it's just going to be a hard selection. Pixels are either in the selection or they are out of the selection. But if I turn up feathering, that's going to soften that border. If I turn it up to 20 and hit okay, now you can see that even though I made the selection on that layer, I'm going to do it on a new layer so you can see what I just selected. I'm going to fill that selection, that feathered selection I just made with my foreground color, and you can see I don't get a hard edge in there. That's what that feathering did. It just feathered that 20 pixels. I selected that general area, but then it feathered it out so I go back and instead make a selection and turn this down to zero, you can see it will stay true to exactly where I made that selection. This will come in handy later on when we have flower colors that are bleeding together and we want to make a selection of them to alter them but don't want there to be a super harsh line left behind, that's where feathering is going to come into play. I'm going to set my black and white back to default by hitting "D" on my keyboard, and I'm going to clean up this mask a little bit for the benefit of you just getting more time to sit with it. Let's take a look at what's happening. I want to hide these pixels that I just selected. These are white and I don't want them to show. Right now though, I'm currently on my artwork layer. I don't want to affect the artwork layer, I want to affect the layer mask of the artwork layer. I want to affect the thing that is showing or hiding pixels. Again, I want to hide these, and what we talked about was that black hides and white reveals. When I went back into my mask mode, it automatically set these back to the grays that I was looking at. I'm going to hit "D" again to go back to black and white. I'm going to hit "X" to bring my black forward because I want to hide these pixels and I'm going to do that by masking them with black. I can paint with black in there and that is the Pen tool. Another great tool that we have is in the Select menu and it is to select by color range. You can see in this landscape painting that I did, everything is all together on one layer. The background touches the landscape which touches this and all these colors are all smushed together. So if I wanted to generally affect the yellow greens in here, it's going to take me awhile to get in and use various tools to select only those colors and there's so much blending going on that it's just, I mean, how am I even going to differentiate what needs to be what? In these cases, I like to select by a color range. I'm going to be on this layer and I'm going to go up to select and color range. We're going to use point samples like we did with the Magic Wand Tool. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to come over here and I'm going to find one of the colors that I want to change and I'm going to click and automatically this is going to show me a representation of what is being selected based on that point sample. This fuzziness is sort of how much it should let in and how much it should choke up. So you can see that I can start to find a nice middle ground of all those greens without selecting too much of the surroundings. But I can also add to and subtract from these points samples. Yes, I want the screen to be selected but I also want to grab this green. I'm going to go ahead and grab my plus sign eyedropper and click in there, and you can see it added more to the shot. Now the problem is, it is starting to select too much of the ground, so I'm either going to try and bring this fuzziness down or I can go ahead and grab my subtract from eyedropper and I can click that color to try and get that out of there. I'm going to say that looks pretty good. It looks like it's got most of the greens and I'm going to hit "Okay". Now the selection we get looks totally crazy and in some cases it looks like it's just getting diagonal lines of things. It's not, it did what you wanted it to do. Just to illustrate that, I'm going to add an adjustment layer of hue and saturation. As I go ahead and adjust the color, you can see that sure enough, it's only adjusting those areas that were selected. I'm not getting a bunch of changes in the sky. I'm not getting a bunch of changes on the ground. I'm really able to get in there and just play around with how those greens look. Now if I turn this adjustment layer on and off, you can see the difference that was made and it only affected those areas where the point sample was selected. Another option we have when selecting, you may notice if I use any tool to make a selection, I get this option up here that says "Select and mask". This is where my powerful Refine Edge Tools live. When I was editing this painting originally, I altered the color of the sky. But you can see that the sky goes down and interacts with all of these intricate brushstrokes. There's a lot of blending where you can't even tell where the landscape ends and the sky begins and it would just be a nightmare, honestly, for me to have to get in there and try to select it by hand. What I'm going to do instead is I'm just going to use my regular Lasso Tool and I'm going to go ahead and roughly drag my cursor around the area that I know the sky is in. I'm just going to go on around here, I'm going to get in the middle of this tree area and come to the other side and then use my hand tool to come up here because it's the sky that I'm selecting. That looks good. I got everything that I need and I'm going to go to "Select and mask." There's a lot going on in here. We're just going to pay attention to a few areas. The first is this view. There are various ways for you to look at your artwork and they're all showing the same thing. They're showing you what part of the picture is being masked and which part is being selected. It just based on your picture, different views are going to be helpful. I like this red overlay because it's drastic enough that I can see. Anything that's red I don't want, anything that I don't want to be selected, I want it to be red and everything that I want to be selected, so in this case, the sky, I'm going to want that to look like it regularly does. The next thing down here is this edge detection, and this radius is saying how many pixels on either side of this border should Photoshop be analyzing. Since I have so much on either side, like in this case, the border is right here, but right here I have these trees outside that I want to be masked, but I have the sky in here that I don't want to be masked. I'm actually going to need to turn this up quite a bit to make sure that it's really looking far enough. Then I want to turn on Smart Radius because Smart Radius is just Photoshop's way of being smart and trying to do a better job. Here is where the magic happens. Over here, I have these various Brush Tools and it's the second one I want. Call this Refine Edge Brush Tool. I'm going to come and click and drag and paint slowly around this edge. You can see that as I do that, it's cleaning up the areas that are masked and not masked. Already this tree looks beautifully covered in red, which is what I want. That means it's not, it's masked, it's being ignored, its not being looked at. Whereas the sky that was peeking through in all of these areas is starting to show. I know that this selection is doing a pretty good job here. It just takes a while for your eyes to get used to what you're looking at. Like if you're looking at this mask and you're like, "What in the what?" It just takes practice. It takes time looking at and thinking like Photoshop and realizing what it's doing. Something again here, it's doing a really nice job. In some of these areas down here where the landscape got really light and started to blend with the sky, it's having a harder time. I'm not going to worry too much about that because it'll be subtle anyway. But I want to make sure that these really big areas of white showing and that these trees are a little bit cleaner. Go out here. That looks pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Okay". Now, I'm going to add a hue saturation on here. As I change the hue of the sky, you can see that I'm able to do that without affecting all of those trees in front of it. Now, if I do something really drastic, we would never do this, but let me just show you what it looks like. You can see I can really get in here and change the color of the sky and those painted elements in front are no longer affected by it. The Refine Edge tool is a really powerful way to make super difficult selections when things are all smashed together. It's the same tool people use when they're selecting a dog's fur or flyaway hair or something. They're not doing that by hand Photoshop is doing the heavy lifting of that. The last selection tool that we are going to get into is Quick Mask. I'm really just going to honorably mention this because this technique, for one thing, I don't use Quick Mask Mode in the traditional way that it's supposed to be used. I use it as a method of separating black and white artwork. It's a way of getting the paper separated from things that I have painted in black or drawn in black. This is a process that is covered in my very first Skillshare class, Digitizing Hand-drawn Sketches. It's the main thing, it's the main concept that is taught in that class, and so I want to go over it because it feels weird to leave it out because we'll be using this process. But I also don't want to waste your time rehashing something that I've already taught. I will go through it, I'm going to show you the process really quickly, but if you find that it confuses you, I would recommend going and taking that class. The first thing I want to mention is that Quick Mask Mode uses the idea of masks in order to separate these pixels. Let's just do a quick Layer Mask review. Remember, this guy that is linked over here to this layer is my Layer Mask. I can tell that I am actively on that because I have these little bounding boxes around it. Basically all the mask is telling me right now is that everything on that layer is being shown because white reveals and black conceals. If I were to paint this Layer Mask black, you can see that the layer doesn't become black, the layer is just hidden and we are able to see the background color beneath it. While this layer mask is selected, I begin painting in white, it's going to start revealing that beneath there, and if I paint in black, it will start concealing it again. That is just your little Layer Mask reminder. I'm going go ahead and delete that layer mask, and what I'm going do is I'm going to hit Command or Control A on my keyboard to select the whole canvas, and then I'm going to hit Command or Control X to cut that art workout. I still have this layer here. It's just an empty layer because I just cut all the pixels off of it. While the artwork is gone, I want to enter Quick Mask Mode, which you can do by selecting this button down here, which looks like a rectangle with a dashed circle in the center. Or you can tap Q on your keyboard. When you do that, the layer is going to turn red. The reason it turns red is if I double-click on my mask over here, this is where I can set up my Quick Mask options. You can see my mask color is this bright red at 50 percent, which is what shows up over here in the layer. Anyway, Quick Mask Mode is on, and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to hit Command or Control V to paste that selection that I had already cut out. What's going to happen is when I paste it, since we're in Quick Mask Mode, Photoshop has automatically analyzed these pixels to figure out what part of the image is masked and which part is not masked. For us, that's great because one part of the image is what we want, it's the artwork and the other part is the background. So we want them to be separated and Photoshop is automatically doing that based on the values of that artwork because the background was white and the foreground was black. Since we know that with masks, what is black is concealed and what is white is revealed, as soon as I exit Quick Mask Mode by hitting Q here, you can see that it made a selection based off of those values. I can see a really clean outline of where those flowers were. But since black is what is concealed, it actually selected all of the white around the flowers and not the flowers themselves. I know that because I have these marching ants going around the outside. If I were to fill this selection by hitting Option or Alt Delete, it's going to fill everything except those flowers because Quick Mask, it did the inverse of what we wanted. We wanted to keep the black and throw away the white, but it did the opposite. So what do we do when we need the opposite of our selection? We inverse our selection by hitting Shift Command or Control I, or going up to select an inverse. Now I still have these pretty marching ants going around my flowers, but I no longer have them going along the outside of the document. Now if I Option or Alt Delete to fill, not only do I have a beautiful Edge, there's nothing left over there, but it also was able to hold onto my varying transparencies. Why? Because when I brought that artwork in, these areas were full black, but these areas were actually gray, and if we remember, when masks are looking at color, white is revealed, black is concealed, and shades of gray become translucent. Which is exactly what happened. This was a lighter shade of gray than the darkest black, and so the pixels aren't fully filled in there. If what I just said blew your mind to pieces, please go check my first class out. This little snippet that I gave you is all you need to know as it'll be used later for the class project. But if you weren't able to follow, if you can't conceptualize what just happened, please go take that first-class because I walk through it in a much more thorough way. But that is Quick Mask. You're going to see that I will use that. Sometimes I'll paint any lettering or textures or anything that needs to be overlaid. Sometimes I'll paint that separately in black and then I can bring it in and alter it later. Again, I paint it in black because that is the way that Photoshop can separate the background for me. But by no means do I have to then keep this as black artwork as you'll see when we get into adjustment layers. I can then get in there and I can start playing around with hue and everything, and I can start to actually alter this artwork so that it's not just black. The black is just the starting spot to get the artwork into Photoshop to digitize. Let's make these selections actually usable and start looking at Adjustment Layers. 8. Adjustment Layer Overview: If I may say so, I believe that we just made it through the boring part of the course. I know it's tedious to talk about all of these different selection tools. But having that under your belt makes adjustment layers so much more interesting and powerful. But making a selection doesn't do anything until you do something with it, which is where adjustment layers come into play. You can think of an adjustment layer as a multi-functional layer. They all do different things, but once you add that layer, it starts to affect all of the layers beneath it. Unless you add a clipping mask or a layer mask, which we'll talk about in a minute. But I'm just going to go ahead and add a hue saturation adjustment layer. By the way, this is where all my adjustment layers live down here. Looks like a black and white cookie. I'm going on click on that. These are all of the ones we have. We're not going to go through all of these. Remember that Photoshop is a photo compositing software. A lot of these are really powerful tools for photo manipulation, but won't really have many implications for what we're doing. For example, vibrance is an adjustment layer that helps you turn up the saturation of a piece without accidentally ruining somebody's skin tone. Obviously that doesn't have much to do with our paintings unless you're painting with skin tone and everything. Don't be overwhelmed when you look down here. We won't have to know all of these and the ones that we do know, you don't even have to have an in-depth understanding of them. You just need to know what they do so you can get in and bump around and use them. Anyway, I'm going to add hue saturation. Anytime you add an adjustment layer, there's a few things that happen. For one, this is our adjustment layer right here. This little icon denotes what adjustment layer it is. Each one that you have will have a little different icon. Then it comes with the layer mask already on it. As we know, this layer mask is saying that everything on this adjustment layer is showing. But if we made an adjustment and wanted to mask some out, we could do that. Also, we have this Dialog box where all of the adjustments actually take place. This is the hue saturation Dialog box. You'll notice that it does come with some presets. Right off the back, I could click Cyanotype, and it automatically recolored my artwork for me. The greatest thing about adjustment layers is they are non-destructive. I can turn the adjustment layer off and you can see that my artwork is still intact. Its integrity is all there. I don't have to worry about it, but I was still able to totally edit the feel and the look of the painting. What is happening right here is called a global adjustment. Right now, this adjustment layer, as you can see, it's not masked out. It's affecting the entire Canvas and it's affecting all of the layers below. You can see that even though this background color is two steps behind this layer, it's still being affected by this adjustment layer. That is a global adjustment. If instead, I only wanted the adjustment layer to affect a certain area of the photo, that is called a local adjustment. I'm going to go ahead and change this to increase saturation more. You'll notice if I toggle this on and off, that it did in fact increase the saturation. Since right now it's a global adjustment, It is also affecting my background color too. But I'm actually happy with the background color I chose. I don't want to boost the saturation of that. I just want a local adjustment of these flowers. Now, as you know, since we have a layer mask here and we have these flowers on their own layer. It would actually be pretty simple for me to command click on this layer. I just made a selection of these flowers, which is remember where I want this adjustment layer to take place. Right now on my Layer Mask, everything is showing, everything is white. If I only want the adjustment layer to show on these flowers, I need it to be black everywhere except where the flowers are. Stick with me. I know we're swapping things around a little bit, so basically all we've done right now is we've selected these flowers. If I make a new layer and I fill that layer, you can see that that's where the selection is. But what we want to do is we want to actually paint on this layer mask right here. And we want to paint black everywhere that these flowers aren't. What I could do is inverse this selection. Then while I'm on my Layer Mask here, I can option delete and fill the selection with black. What that does is now if I turn this adjustment layer on and off, you can see it as only affecting my flowers. And you can see in the adjustment or the layer mask that that's what's happening. The only place that the pixels of this adjustment layer are showing through are where those flowers are, and everywhere it's masked out. That's great and all that's really nice that you can use a layer mask. I'm going to go ahead and paint the mask back to white so that the adjustment layer is a global adjustment happening everywhere. You can totally do it that way. You can take a few steps and do a layer mask. But one of the really quick ways to just make an adjustment layer to a local adjustment is to hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard. I do see the icon that I'm getting. I'm getting a little mask icon with an arrow. That means that I'm about to make a clipping mask. I'm about to clip this adjustment layer to the flower layer. I'm just going to do that. You can see that what happens is I get the same result as when I made the layer mask, but I actually didn't even have to go into the mask at all. The clipping mask by default, that's what Photoshop has it do is it took this adjustment layer and it said, "I only want you to apply yourself to where there are pixels on the layer directly beneath you." You'll see when I work on my class project that sometimes I do work in the layer mask. In general, if I'm just trying to get a local adjustment of a layer, it's really easy to make a clipping mask. Another example of this to help it be more visual is an adjustment layer. I can put in here as a solid color. I'm going to make it red and I can make a clipping mask again, I'm going to hold Option or Alt to clip to this flower layer. Now try to imagine what's going to happen. Just try to think through Photoshop is doing. Right now, this red layer is taking up this whole Canvas. When I click this button, it is going to clip the color to only show up where the pixels are on this layer. When I click this, sure enough, the red only applies to where there were pixels on the layer below, which to us is the shape of flowers. I'm able to clip that right down there. Clipping masks are really important. You'll see me use them more and they are not to be confused with layer masks. You can use them in tandem with each other. For instance, let's say I have the solid color clipped here, but then actually, let's say in the center of the flowers, I want that yellow to show through. What I can do is paint with black on this mask to hide this color. What it's going to do is reveal the yellow below. I could keep going back with black and white. Now I have utilized a clipping mask and a layer mask to make a local adjustment with this red color. Now the last thing I want to mention about this is since you can have local and global adjustments, and since the adjustment layers affect everything below it, this means that stacking order is going to become pretty important. I'm going to add two adjustment layers. In this first one, I'm going to use a hue saturation preset to make this. Actually, I'll just do it by hand. I'm going to make it black and white. I have a global adjustment that is affecting everything beneath that there's no clipping mask. There is no layer mask that is altering where these pixels are showing. This adjustment layer is shining through and through. But what if on top of that, I add another hue and saturation adjustment. This time I am going to have it show only where the flowers are. I'm going to go ahead and paint. Stay with me again. I held down Command or Control and clicked on this Layer to select these flowers. But what I actually want is everything but the flowers. I'm going to go ahead and inverse that selection by hitting Shift Command I. Then in this layer mask, I'm going to go ahead and paint with black. That again, I'm only showing where those flowers are. Now I'm going to go ahead and change this. Now what's happening is we first had an adjustment layer, make everything black and white. But then on top of that, an adjustment layer that overruled, said, "Hey, you know what, she wanted there to be color on top of this." Now this color is being applied on top of the black and white adjustment layer, which is being applied on top of all of this. If I change the stacking order of this, you can see that the effect changes, which is really the point I'm trying to get to. I'm not trying to have you get lost so much in what adjustments I'm making. I don't need you to stay with me there. I just need you to see that the stacking order that we put these adjustment layers in changes the effect even though I haven't even changed the adjustment layers or the masks or anything themselves. Keep that in mind. You can think of it as whenever you have an adjustment layer, it's blanketing down. Anything you put on top of that is going to blink it down on top of those adjustment layers. Then as you have add masks and clipping masks, that's going to change. But if you ever are getting an effect that you don't understand or you can't figure out what's happening, there's probably a stacking order situation happening. Those are our adjustment layers. They are multi-functional layers that live on top of our artwork and affect everything beneath it unless you add a clipping mask or affect a layer mask. Some of them come with presets and if they do, there will be a drop-down in the Dialog box that comes up with it. You can make adjustments global by having them affect everything, or have them be local by just having them affect a certain part of the image. Let's get to the fun part and actually show you how these adjustment layers work. 9. Adjustment Layers Pt 1: Yeah, so we now get into the actual adjustment layers and I just want to make a really quick confession to you to help you feel comfortable. If you're just starting out, and you don't have a scanner, I actually didn't buy a scanner until making this class. I did it so that I could scan the project resources cleanly without you having to deal with some of the BS that I deal with when I would digitize from photos. I bring this up to let you know that it's going to be a lot more work but if you don't have a scanner, it's not impossible to digitize your work. I'm going to use this painting slash drawing as an example for most of the adjustment layers we're about to go through. But I just wanted to show you really quickly how it started and how I would go from here. If you're scanning in your images than you're already good to go. The colors, the levels are going to be spot on, the background's going to already be its whitest white and all of that. But if you take a picture here is how you can handle it. The first thing is that if I click down here, I can see that my resolution is only 72 pixels in inch. That is the resolution that my phone takes pictures in and that might be fine for my phone but that's not going to be high enough quality for any output that I'm going to use this for. The first thing I need to do is go to image and image size and right now the width of my document is 42 inches by 56 but that's at 72 pixels per inch. I want to bump this up to 300 so that it's higher quality, but I can't just keep it at the same size and bump up the resolution. Photoshop, doesn't know how to fill in the information that's missing so to compensate, since I bumped the resolution up, I need to bring the size back down. I usually like to cut in half, sometimes a little bit more, in this case I'm just going to type 20 inches by 26 and hit Okay. Now yes, the image width is only 20 inches instead of 40, but I'm at full 300 DPI instead of 72 DPI and what's best is when I zoom in, I get all of my detail and everything. The next thing is I would make sure to erase everything from the background and I will show you why. Actually, I'm just going to get into the adjustment layers to show you why. The first adjustment layer we have is Levels. This is a very powerful adjustment layer and in here we have a histogram. The Histogram is a visual representation of the data of this image. Even if this image wasn't open, I can actually gather a lot of information just from looking at this histogram. This histogram is looking at the input; so that's this image we are inputting and it is telling us how that information is distributed for the blackest blacks, the whitest whites, and the mids. Just by looking at this, I can see that most of my data is concentrated in this area which falls between the mids and the highlights, which tells me that the image is probably overall very light and we can see that it is. Down here though I get a big bump in these dark colors. There doesn't seem to be a gradual thing, there's a bunch of light. There's a middle or low amount of these and then we have this bump of dark pixels. Sure enough, if I look at the image that's what's happening here. My histogram is actually going to change based on what my image is. What I wanted to say was the next thing I would do with this photo, since I didn't scan it in, is I'm going to click on this lock to change it from a background layer to a regular layer and I'm actually going to cut all of this information out. I'm going to grab my Marquee tool and just drag a loose rectangle over this. I'm going to hit Shift-Command-I to inverse my selection, and I'm going to hit Command or Control X to cut that out. Now if I open my histogram back up, you can see it actually looks different. I no longer have that bump of information down there. Most of my information is still gathered around here, but overall the histogram has changed. It's important before you begin to make any level adjustments, that you only have information in the frame that is pertinent. Actually, I'm not going to use the painted background that came with this and so I'm just going to remove that right now. We're going to talk about the Magic-eraser tool in another video, but for right now I'm just going to do a few couple quick clicks. It's not going to be a perfect selection by any means, but just something to remove the majority of that background out of here. That's fine. You see I have some artifacts over here, so I'm just going to quickly use my Lasso tool to select around this. Then I'm going to actually cut this out of the background and paste it on a new layer by hitting Shift-Command or Control-B and then I can delete this layer. Now all we have is this stem and I'm going to go ahead and add a solid color behind it for the background color. Okay, so now we have our painting, it's brought in here and that's what I would do just to get things ready to start playing around with this. Now back to our levels adjustment. Now you can see my histogram has changed considerably. This button right here is saying that the image has changed since the last time the histogram has been calculated so you can click it again, just to update it. But now this is the accurate picture of what we have in this image. You can see I have two areas. The strongest data are light values. I have almost an exact a single value here which is probably that background color and then this brighter one is where some of those whites are hitting in there. Then of course I have very few blacks and in the middle, these are just my mids, so everything's even keel right here. I'm not really getting any contrast or any lightness. Now, I can start changing the way that this image looks by affecting these sliders. Right now, this right here determines my blackest black. Right now, the only parts of the image that are showing up as blackest black are the pixels that are showing up in this part of the histogram, which is a very small amount of our overall picture. If I start dragging this to the right, you can see that this information, everything to the left of it is being clipped to full black. As I drag more and more is going to become full black, which essentially increases my contrast and becomes very intense. On the other side of this, we have this which is indicating our whitest white. Right now, our whitest white there is a lot of it, but as I drag to the left, more and more of the picture is going to be considered bright white and it's going to start getting washed out. Now with any of these sliders, there comes a point where it becomes too intense. But the nice thing is sometimes if you can't remember, if you open this up later on and you can't remember what I was talking about or how this works, you can simply just pay attention to what's happening. Ask yourself, "Okay, I'm clicking and dragging this black slider and I notice that more of the image is becoming a very strong black. Do I want more or less of that? As I click and drag the white slider to the left, I can see more of the picture is becoming airy, but at some point it becomes blown out. But maybe somewhere in here it looks nice." Then this guy in the middle helps how that distribution should look. Right now, when it's smack dab between these two, you have a nice even distribution of shadows, mid-tones and highlights. If instead, I start to bring this closer to the shadows, you can see I'm literally stretching out all the area that these pixels have to appear light so the picture is overall becoming lighter. If instead I drag the mids to the right, you can see that the area that the shadows and mids take up is way greater than the area that the highlights take up and so there is less of them. What this means is the levels adjustment is really great for overall lightness and darkness in contrast. Now you'll notice if I go to the adjustment layers, that there is a brightness and contrast adjustment layer. You might be asking, why would you use this more complex thing? That's because the brightness in contrast slider, you can't drill down. You literally can affect the brightness or you can affect the contrast. The levels This adjustment is just a little bit more sophisticated in handling what's going on.The output levels just don't affect us as much with digitizing our paint, but I just want you to understand that. Up here we said, how many pixels in the picture should be considered white is white and black is black. The output is now saying how black that black is black should be, and how white that white is white should be. For instance, if I drag this over and I say, I want a lot of this image to appear darker. I really want that in there, but I actually want the darkest dark to be a lot lighter. You can see that I'm still adjusting it so that more of these pixels are darker and more intense, but at the same time the output level has been clipped so the darkest black can only get to here. It's not going to get down to there. Similarly, if I bring this down, then my whitest whites can only be so white. Again, this is more for photo manipulating, but I didn't want to leave it out because the output slider is right there. But for the most part where I find the levels adjustment the most helpful, is just my overall lightness and darkness. Let me go ahead and adjust this like I normally would. I'm going to go down here and click this curly arrow to reset everything. Now I'm going to go ahead and see what I can do. First, overall, this thing needs to be lighter. I'm going to drag this to the left, but when I do that, it starts to get hazy. I want make sure I have some of those darker values in there and then I think that some of this can get brighter too. Now notice, since this is a global adjustment, it's affecting everything. I actually don't want it to affect my background layer. I just want to affect this stem. I'm going to do a clipping mask by holding Option or Alt and clicking in there. Now you can see the before and after of what that levels adjustment has done. Honestly, levels is the reason I was able to work with taking pictures of my art on my phone and then bringing it in. If I didn't have such powerful adjustments with levels, it would've been really hard for me to correct that lighting to get it to look bright and at its best. That is levels. I guess I'll keep that. Now let's go ahead and talk about human saturation. Lot of fun in here. I'm going to go ahead and clip this to the stem layer because again, I just want to affect the stem itself. Let's take a look at these sliders. As we talked about in the last video, I do have some presets up here. Sometimes, especially with paint, if you don't know what a piece needs, like sometimes I'll open something and I just know, this needs to be brightened up, this color needs to be shifted slightly. But with something like this, the day that I painted and drew this, I texted my friend Aaron and was like, "Oh, I've painted the ugliest thing." But then I was able to bring it in here and actually play around with it. I found that it wasn't that ugly. I was able to do a lot with it. On days like that, it's nice to have presets that can give you ideas and slightly adjust things without you having to do all the heavy lifting. I'm going to set my preset back to default. The first slider we have here is our hue slider, what this is doing is it is taking the colors that we see and it is shifting them. No single hue is staying the same color. They're not getting any brighter or darker, they're just changing the actual hue. The saturation slider handles the intensity of that color. As I drag it all to the way to the left, we drain all of that color out. As I drag it to the right, it becomes very overly intensely saturated. Down here we have this lightness lighter, but may I suggest that you stay away from it because it doesn't lighten and darken in the same way our levels just did. It's like gamma in that when I bring this to the right, my darkest values get lighter, and when I bring it to the left, my lightest values get darker. I get it if that didn't make any sense to you. But basically, here, let me just show you. If I want to change the color and I'm like, "I like this looking like green, but that's too intensive a green. I could bring down the saturation and bring up the lightness to bring in a nicer green." But you can see that I lost all of the contrasts in there and now this whole thing looks really washed out. Instead of handling the lightness there, I could go back into my levels and maybe lighten this up a little bit to try and achieve getting lighter values in this area while still holding on to the darks. That's just my tip to you. I find that it's just hard to get a result that you want with this. Sometimes if you're going into colorize, which basically sets the entire image to a single hue. Then the lightness can work out a little bit because you're not dealing so much with an overall color shift. You can see that it doesn't look too crazy for me to lighten this up because it has a certain low volume look. Again, I wouldn't really affect the lightness too much unless you're colorizing. But that is hue and saturation. We're going to use this a lot. Not only can you get in and affect the overall hue, but you can get into the different color families in here. This is great if you are painting in a way that aligns with how Photoshop sees these colors. We're used to a traditional color wheel, but Photoshop is using an RGB color wheel. For me, I might see, to me these might be yellows or something, but maybe to Photoshop that's actually more of a green or whatever. So just to point out that you can get in here and actually drill down into the colors you want to change and just change those. I'm going to get down into the yellows here. If I switch the hue, that's going to give me a good idea of what is yellow, and it looks like most of this image is reading as yellow. Now I get to decide what I want it to look like. I think I want it to be a little peach here, maybe a little bit lighter. I was able to affect all of those yellows without touching those blues. Then down here you can see this is the visual representation of what is happening. As I change the hue, you can see that rainbow on the bottom is shifting. That means that this top rainbow it's showing us what colors were affecting, then this bar below is showing what we're changing them to. Without even looking at this image, I can look and see that, this is the area of colors that I'm affecting. As I drag this around, I can see, I'm changing them to blue, I'm changing them to yellow, to orange, to red, to pink. That's a nice visual representation. These inner, guys, are what's dictating how big of a color slice you're shifting. If I wanted to change more of my oranges and yellows and not just my yellows, I can widen that out. Now I'm going to see a bigger color shift than I saw before. Similarly, I can drag these into a really narrow hue and try to only affect a certain shade of yellow. These outside handles are handling the fall off. It's like the radius idea. If I have these blowing out a lot, yes, I'm only asking it to adjust this little slice of pie in here, but I'm also giving a lot of lenience on either side. I'm going to see a bigger color shift. Lots of power in here. You're going to see this put to use a lot later on for my class project. 10. Adjustment Layers Pt 2: Next we're going to look at color balance. I'm going to open this up and select color balance, and this one is pretty straightforward. Now, do you remember earlier when I said we are dealing with the RGB Color Wheel. These are the RGB complimentary colors. So in primary world we know that blue and orange or complimentary colors. But actually in the RGB Color Scale, blue is opposite of yellow and they are complimentary colors. In the class resources, I have included an RGB Color Wheel. It's a little bit of a mind bender when you're so used to the traditional color wheel. But it'll make understanding what Photoshop is doing a lot easier. But these are our complimentary colors. So cyan is the compliment to read, magenta is the compliment to green and yellow is the compliment to blue and instead of red, yellow and blue being our primary colors, RGB, red, green, and blue are our primaries. What this color balance guy lets us do, is it lets us switch between the shadows, mid tones and highlights to just shift how these colors are appearing. So for instance, I'm going to go to my highlights and you can see if I drag this slider towards blue, just my very top highlights are just slightly erring on the side of blue. We're not totally clown changing this color and that's actually what I love about the color balance is I can really slightly go in here and start altering the overall look, without doing anything that's too crazy and without changing the color relationships too much. I can get into my mid tones and do something different. So again, if you know that you want to alter a piece, but you don't really know what it needs. Sometimes getting in here and altering the color balance can be a really fun way to play around with it and the nice thing is, like I said, it's not going to be too intense of a color. It's not as big of a swing as when we use hue and saturation. You can see that just while talking, I was just clicking and sliding around and I was able to come up with a new color scheme that's pretty interesting, that keeps all of those lights and darks in place. Definitely a very cool and subtle adjustment layer. Another one is the Photo Filter, and this one is also pretty subtle. Right now these are all the filters that come with it. So I could just pick one of these and it's just going to give a very slight color cast, to the overall design. Which is great, or I can pick my own color, so I can go to color here and I can say, overall I think this needs to be warmer, but I don't want to blow out those colors. Then if I want it to be more or less, I can drag these, you can see where it's affecting it. Now again, I was able to make a considerable adjustment, but it doesn't look ridiculous. It was enough, it handled it very subtly. Another way to handle this is, we're going to talk about Blend Modes and everything, but you can create your own photo filter just by going ahead and picking a solid color. Let's say I want my picture to be warmer overall. I can now go into my Blend Mode, bring this into multiply, and just bring the opacity down. You can see I'm getting essentially the same thing as a color filter. Sometimes it's nice if you just want to do the photo filter and have it do it yourself or you can make your own just by doing a color fill with a blend mode beneath it. Next we have the Channel Mixer and this one, brain wise is a bit of a mind bender. But I will say that this is another one of those tools where if you don't know what your piece needs, it can be a really fun way, to explore and come up with colors that could work for it. So stick with me while I explain how it works. Basically, you pick the Channel Mixer by starting with one of the channels, red, green, or blue and we will start with red. By default, the red channel, is saying right now, the reds are at 100 percent and now what I can do is I can adjust whether any of the greens in this image should lean towards red, or if they should lean more towards cyan. Should the blue pixels lean more towards red, or more towards cyan. Now why is it going to cyan on this side? Because we are dealing with the red channel and the complimentary of red is cyan. So I can either tell the green pixels in here to be more red, or I can tell them to be more cyan. I can tell the blue pixels to be more red or be more cyan. I'm going to bring this up because I actually like those greens becoming a little peachier. It's a nice way to warm it up and even if you didn't understand, if you can't conceptualize what's happening, if you can get in here and change your channels around and just slide this stuff around, you can start to get some really interesting color mixes. Again, if I do a clipping mask, then it's not going to affect the background too. Again, that's a really fun way to play around with color. Especially when this is just one layer that has all of these colors together. If I just isolate and change one, it's possible that I'm going to throw off the whole dynamic and I don't want to do that. These Channel Mixers, the Photo Filter, Color Balance, they are all ways to just slightly adjust the overall look without throwing off the correctness of the values and all of that. Next, we're going to look at Gradient Maps. I'm going to delete my Channel Mixer and I'm going to go to Gradient Map and this is super fun because it's going to map colors based on the lightness and darkness of my image. I'm just going to clip this down to the layer below and I'm going to click my gradient here and I have some different gradients filtered in here. But basically what it's going to do, is it's going to map these colors to the lightest and the darkest. This is not always predictable if you're not used to seeing the lightness and darkness in your images, but it can still be a really fun way, especially if you need to pull colors together. You can find some really interesting effects by changing what these gradients look like. You could get in here and say, I want it to be red and orange or whatever the case may be and you're able to adjust that. I wish I used Gradient Maps more though honestly, I don't think too. But it is really fun. It's one of those tools that's actually fun to just play around with as opposed to others where when people say just play around with it, it's a nightmare. But the Gradient Map really is fun to play around with. At the very least, if I had spent some time digitizing this and felt like it never quite found its way and I was ready to give up on it. Maybe I'd throw a Gradient Map on there to see if I can salvage it or something. But just an idea for you. Now we will look at Selective Color. Selective color is going to let us choose these Photoshop groups, these colors has and then it's going to let me get in here and actually mix this cyan, magenta, yellow, and black that is part of there. So I'm going to go into my blacks and I'm going to go into my yellows. Basically what this is saying is within all of the yellows on here and if I want, I can slide this to any extreme to see what it considers the yellows. I can then get in there and if like for instance, I think this yellow is a little too hot. I want to warm it up. I can actually go ahead and add some magenta into there and that's just going to slightly shift that yellow. Again, it's nothing drastic but it helped keep everything in line while still making adjustments. I'm going to reset this and I'm actually going to stand my reds and I'm going to slightly alter the red that is showing here. You can see if I turn magenta down, that's going to get really yellow, if I turn magenta up, no huge change. I can adjust these until I get the color I want. So I'm going to go with the lighter pink and I want it to be a peachier pink. Maybe a little lighter and you can see that even if I can't always remember what these specifically do, but I'm still able to get in there and now I've got this really cute pink color where that harsh read was. So those are our adjustment layers. I'm really excited to start putting this all together into the actual class project because that's when you can see what all these tools actually mean together. You'll get to see some before and afters and actually,see a peace come to life. But before we get there, I have a few extra helpful tools that are going to help you digitize your paint. 11. Extra Tools: These are the grab bag of tools that I have relied on over the years and began to rely on more as I digitize my paint, and I just think that they can really help you out. One that you've probably heard of if you've watched any classes on Skillshare with digitizing paint, is the magic eraser tool. I'm going to hit "E" on my keyboard and then I'm actually going to hold Shift and keep tapping E until my magic eraser comes up. You can see that it's the third tool under our Eraser Fly Out. It's pretty simple. It's got a tolerance reading, which we know is going to give us more or less leeway on our point sample when we click. We have a contiguous checkbox right here, right now with it checked, it means it's only going to select or get rid of pixels that are touching the sample that I click. Then this anti-alias is just a way to smooth out edges so that they don't look super jagged. What I'm going to do is I'm just simply going to click on the white area that I want to get rid of. You can see that without me doing anything else, it did a pretty good job of removing the background. Now if I get in really close, I can see a little bit of a white edge in there, but for a start, it's really not that bad. Let's see if I can turn this up and get something better. The nice thing about the magic eraser tool and especially when you have a clean white background like this, you can really hike the tolerance up. As long as you know that there's a strong border between the white and the area you're getting rid of, you don't have to worry about it getting rid of too many pixels. I'll try that. If I zoom in, that's a lot. That's even better than it was at 30. I can go ahead and click in here. With two clicks, I was able to fully remove the background. Now the caveat to this is it doesn't always do it perfectly. If I do a really dark background and get in here, you can see that there's still a little bit of a white edge around. We could of course, try to turn this up higher and get it. But at this point, magic eraser has done the heavy lifting of what I wanted to do. Now if I want this to be any cleaner then I would just use other tools to clean it up. Like the mug earlier, I actually don't like how bumpy this is anyway. I would probably go in there with the pen tool to clean up that selection. That is the magic eraser. It's super awesome. It's not perfect. It still leaves a little bit of a white edge, but as far as getting started, it's pretty great. Really quickly, I can uncheck this contiguous and it works just like before where even though I'm clicking right here, it can also detect the white that's over here that isn't contiguous to these pixels and it can still pick it out. The problem especially with watercolor, is there tends to be a lot of white that shows through in our artwork so it's going to throw that stuff out too. I would rather just have contiguous checked and then click twice and then it gets pretty close. If I need to do any cleanup or edge refinement, I can go in and do that. Next, we're going to talk about the spot healing and regular healing brush tool. This is not a painting, but it's so effective to show how powerful these tools are by showing them on what they were developed for, which is really skin correction. My spot healing brush tool and healing brush tool, they have the shortcut of J and they live in the same spot and they do similar things except one works harder for us and one doesn't. They both work hard but one works a tiny bit harder. Right now I have the spot healing brush tool, which is this top one. You'll notice that up here it says content-aware. We're not going to get into the create texture and proximity match, but content-aware is the closest, in my opinion, that Photoshop gets to wizardry before it gets scary. It's really amazing what content-aware does. It means that Photoshop is actually looking at and analyzing this information to try and make sense of it. The great thing about the spot healing brush tool is I can just click once over this blemish and boom, it magically disappeared. I can even click and drag and draw a larger area and as soon as I let go, it's going to correct and fix that. It's really pretty incredibly powerful. Now the only problem here is I am working right on my layer. I was just working destructively. There's no way for me to get those blemishes back except for edit command Z and walking backwards. However, since our awesome content-aware spot healing brush tool has this sample all layers checkbox that means I can actually make a new blank layer and still clean up the information that's on here while being non-destructive. I'm going to make those same corrections that I did a minute ago. Get in here and clean all this up. You can see in these harder areas, I might have to do it a few times for it to get it right. But you can see that now all of those corrections were made on a separate layer, and so it's non-destructive and I can see the before and after. That's the spot healing brush tool. The regular healing brush tool is similar except for we are going to dictate where it should be healing from, where that sample is. Instead of just clicking once and having it heal, I'm first going to hold down optional Alt and I'm going to pick a sample area that I want Photoshop to pull from. Basically what Photoshop is going to do is it's going to take the texture of whatever I sample and it's going to blend it with the color of whatever I'm trying to correct. This is a nice clear area. I'm going to go ahead and set this as my target. While holding option and Alt I'm going to click just once. Now you can see that my cursor actually has a little patch of skin in it. If I hover over this red and just click down, what it did was it took that texture, but it used the color around the blemish to figure out what color it should be. For instance, down here, this is a little bit darker, but it's okay. I can grab this texture and drop it over here and it's going to do a pretty great job of blending the colors so that it doesn't look too crazy. Again, I did that destructively. I was working right on my layer. But if I make a new layer above, I can actually go up here to have it do sample the current and below layers. I can work non-destructively on the new layer, just like I did with the spot healing brush tool. That is now its own thing. The spot heal and the regular healing brush tool are just really powerful. The practical way that I use it because when I'm painting people with blemishes that need to be removed, hopefully. But if I get a big water splat on my paper or an ink splat or something these tools make it really easy for me to go in there and correct them without it being noticeable to the eye. Next we're going to talk about the patch tool. The patch tool also lives under healing brush tool with the keyboard shortcut of J. It's really cool. This is where the tools get super magical. Basically I'm able to patch, I'm able to lay out an area that needs to be patched and then drag an area. Let me just do it. I'm not going to try and put it into words. Do you see how this shadow is getting fatter at the end? That was a mistake. My brush, I accidentally pushed down too hard and I actually want this to taper a little bit more nicely, but I still wanted to blend in with this background. What I'm going to do is with the patch tool, I'm going to draw the shape that I wish that was. I'm actually going to select this area that I want to remove. You can see what I'm leaving behind is just this tapered shadow. What I am going to patch is all of this extra blobbiness that I did. After I make a selection, all I have to do is simply click and drag within the selection and it starts to grab those pixels nearby to replace it with. As soon as I let go, Photoshop is going to blend those together to give me a nice solution in the middle. Just with a few clicks, I was really able to perfectly seamlessly correct that brush without it being noticeable at all. I also want to talk about the content-aware move tool. Actually, I'm going to save it. I'll save that magic for a second. I'm going to jump down to the clone stamp tool. The clone stamp tool, let me go back to my face here, it works very similarly to the healing brush tools that we were using, except for where Photoshop was trying to do work for us. It's trying to blend textures and colors and everything. The clone stamp tool is more less an exact copy of your sample area and you can have a hard or a soft edge. For instance, if I go in with my stamp tool, I set her earring as the sample and then I go in and color the scene. You can see it's not blending with the skin tone. It's just letting me copy exactly what was there based on where we set our sample point. This can be nice. There are times when you don't want so much blendiness and maybe you want a harder edge. Right now you can see my brush has a soft edge, but I can turn the hardness up. Then anything that I stamp in here I'm now going to be able to make exact copies of so I could go in and make little patches of her skin. But they're going to be very obvious because it's an exact copy. This can be helpful sometimes if I'm duplicating an element or a part of a painting that I can't select. It's really nice to use this, but I just wanted to point that out so that you can see the differentiation between those tools. We're going to do some more content-aware stuff. The first thing I'm going to do is show you how you can remove something from an image. When you have paintings like this that are all together, it's going to be hard for me to cut this cactus out and remove it on my own, but not with the content-aware fill. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use my basic laser tool just to draw a rough selection around this cactus that I'm actually going to remove from this area. I'm going to go up to edit. I was trying to go to edit and fill. I noticed it was grayed out, whenever something happens like that and something that you know works is grayed out, it usually means that you have something incorrect selected. Right now I made this selection and I'm on a group and Photoshop is saying, you can't fill with a group, you have to be on a layer. Now that I'm on a layer, I can go up to edit and fill is there. Get ready, this is going to be so cool. We want to make sure that contents is set to Content-Aware. I want to make sure color adaptation is checked. Then honestly, I don't change any of this, I just hit "Okay" and watch what happens. Cactus is gone and it replaced it with other content. Now it's not perfect. You can see that we can see an edge here, but considering that there was just a painted cactus there and now it looks like, if I squint my eyes, maybe I couldn't tell. That's pretty incredible. This is a really powerful tool. If you made a mistake, you just need to get something out of the painting and you don't know how to patch it. The Content Aware Phil can really help you out there. Similarly, we have the Content Aware Move Tool. This is the last tool that we're going to cover in this little drop-down. It's got this crissy-crossy arrows. Basically it's going to do something similar to the last one. Well, instead of just getting rid of this cactus, I'm actually going to move it to a different part of the painting. Then after I move it, it's not only going to blend that with the surrounding areas, it's going to fill the space that I left behind. I'm going to go ahead, drag around, leave these flowers out. Now what I'm going to do is with my cursor inside that selection, I'm going to go ahead and move it to its new home and let go. I'm going to rotate this a little bit actually. I'm going to hit "Enter". As soon as I hit "Enter" Photoshop's going to start doing its thing. You can see that it moved that cactus and replaced the area in here. Now it actually didn't do it blended a lot in here, I think it got confused with these pixels. But again, considering Photoshop was just trying to figure out what we want. Sorry about that little clinch my microphone that I'm recording into died and so I got a little thrown off. I'm just going to read you this. I'm in the Content Aware Move Tool, and I'm going to go ahead and move this cactus. I'm also hoping that somehow the results will be better than last time. Maybe I'll just move him a little bit. Let's say I just wanted to move this cactus slightly. It wasn't such a huge shift. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Enter". Now let's see how it does. That's definitely better than before. But in either case, it's still incredible to me that Photoshop is able to even do that good of a job of patching and moving that stuff around. That is very excellent. The last thing I want to show you, and I actually did not prepare this, but I just remember it is one of the main things that we can do once we have all of this artwork ready to go, is we can use brushes. We can use brushes and selections to enhance the artwork that's there. I'm going to go ahead and just paste this in. I need to do some quick levels adjustments. First, I need to desaturate this. I'm going to do my quick mask method again. I just need to make sure that my brightest whites are really white. My black as blacks, are really black. There we go, I am going to cut, paste, and we've got it. Brushes and blend modes are just another way to add a ton to what we're doing. Earlier I had shown you these flowers and then I went behind the scenes and painted them and I didn't show you. Brushes are just another powerful addition to what we can do to bring our artwork to life. I'm going to go ahead and lock the transparent pixels on this layer. Now, as I draw over them with a brush, the coloring is only going to happen to the area where there are pixels on that layer. I'm going to go in, I think I have my gouache already. I'm going to grab one of these Kyle's paint box gouache brushes. If you are a Photoshop, CC 2019 later, maybe 2018 and later, Kyle's brushes are just built-in. These are still my old ones that I bought back when you could buy them separately but very great brushes. Anyway, with my lock transparent pixels, I'm just going to go in here and start painting. First, I know I want the petals to be lighter than this. Actually that I don't want that, but to be that. Using my lasso tool to go and then just select,all this stuff is on one layer and I just want to be able to quickly brush this out without hitting any of the leaves. Then I can go in here with a yellow. Oops sorry. Paint this in. This is a really great way if you're not comfortable yet with your painting skills., but you can at least get the shapes down, this is a way for you to be able to still paint, but then have lots of options for when you bring things into Photoshop. You can paint that like that and then the stems. Again, I'm going to use my lasso tool just to select only the stem areas that's going to make it so that I can be a little more haphazard with coloring them in. I'm going to make my brush bigger by hitting the right bracket key on my keyboard. I can make it smaller by hitting the left one. You can also go up to your brush up here and change the size. You can also change the hardness of most brushes, but with Kyle's brushes, you can't. They have built-in characteristics. But if you like the keyboard shortcut of the left and right bracket for that, you can also do shift left and right bracket to effect the hardness. Anyway, I just want to quickly brush this all in. Then maybe I'll grab a darker green for some shading. Voila, in just a few minutes, I was able to paint these digitally. They're not perfect, I would usually spend more time on them. But from going from full black to a painted piece that is fully digitized, that's a pretty awesome way to go. The last thing I want to show you really quickly is how you can utilize brushes and blend modes. I'm going to command click on this layer to select all of these flowers. On this new layer up here, I'm going to paint with some red in some of these areas. Now that's a little harsh. That's not really the look I was going for, but I can cycle through my blend modes to see if I find one that I like. That's pretty. Then I can turn the opacity down. Now I was able to add in this new effect really quickly just by changing the blend mode and changing the opacity. Those are the extra tools, the Magic Erase, Spot Healer, Regular Realing Brush tool. I showed you the patch tool that Clone Stamp, the Content-Aware Fill, and Move. Now we've got brushes and blend modes. Now guys, I finally get to show you how to compile this class project and how to actually digitize and enhance your paintings. 12. Putting It Together Pt 1: Since recording the past few videos, I have plugged in my Perfection V550 Epson Scanner. My God, why did I wait so long to get a scanner. I'm happy that I worked from photos for so long because I can be a testament to say that you can do it, you can pull it off. But if you have $200 and you're going to be doing this a lot, goodness, please go get a scanner. It makes things so much easier. I texted my friend Aaron immediately and he was like, why did I wait so long? What was I thinking? So anyway, now that I'm scanning and I'm fancy, I needed to scan my painting in three separate parts to make sure that I cover all of the ground. I just want to show you how I patch those together. As far as scanning goes. This is how I have mine set up. I am using an Epson V550 and you can see I can save my settings in here. I started in professional mode. So I can save all my settings. I basically just kept it as a Photoscan. I did upgrade the color to 48-bit resolution at 600. It can go much higher, but I didn't want the file sizes to be massive. I'm scanning the entire document and then I just made sure that it was scanning to the right place and that I knew where it was going. I have them going into a folder called scans and then I just went ahead and scanned it in. I'm going to grab all three of these and drag them into Photoshop. The first thing I want to do is it doesn't matter which one it happens to, but I want to grab my crop tool by hitting "C" on my keyboard. It's also this icon over here underneath the Magic Wand and quick selection tool. I just want to hold down Option or Alt on my keyboard and drag out from the sides. Because I need more room to work with here. Go back to my move tool, by hitting V on my keyboard. Now I basically just need to bring these other scans into this document. This looks like it's the right side, I going to move it over. I can do that two ways. I can hit Command or Control A to select all, and hit command C to copy in command V to paste or control if you're on a PC, can put that in here. That's great for instances like this where we know that the canvas encompasses everything that's on that layer. There are sometimes when I'm making patterns or something where the artwork and the layer is actually falling off the canvas. If I were to transfer those to a new document by copying and pasting, I would cut off and trim those pixels that are hanging off. So in times when you want to transfer one or more layers to a new document without trimming it, without copying and pasting, you can actually just hit this lock button to turn it from a background layer to a regular one. You can select all the layers that you want to transfer. In this case, it's just one. I can actually click and drag it to that document and drop it in there. The main thing I want to do is make sure that the scan that is scanning the middle area so it doesn't have either edge is on top in my Layers panel and that everything is on the correct side. I'm going to turn this top layer down and opacity to about 75 percent. All I'm going to do is I'm going to slide the layers behind it until they overlap nicely with the artwork in the middle. Now the main thing here is we really only need to pay attention to the edges. It's nice if you can get them to perfectly line up, but if they don't, it's going to be just fine because we're actually going to be masking this. But I just want to in general makes sure that everything is lining up. That looks pretty good. What I'm talking about is, if you look here, let me do a little better, there we go. You can see that these edges are lining up nicely, but actually over here it looks like they're not aligned. That' because there was something slightly rotated or a tiny bit off in the second scan. But that's okay. We just want to make sure that things like I said are generally lining up. That's what I'm talking about. So that looks good on that side. Then on this side I'm going to do the same thing, just going to drag that in. I'm zooming in and out of my canvas by hitting command or control plus and minus key. It's a good keyboard shortcut to know pretty basic. Again, everything is lining up nicely on this edge, even if I'm getting some weird ghosting over here. That looks good, and now I'm going to turn this layer opacity back up to 100. Now the reason that I did the scan in three instead of two is because you can see the edges of my scanner are darker than the middle. So by scanning a third middle section, I can cover this seam of where they meet. What I'm going to do is add a layer mask to the top layer. Because of course now the edges of this one are going to be too dark, but I can mask those out to show the clean on the scan beneath. So I have a hard brush, just a regular round hard brush. I have black as my foreground color because I want to hide these pixels on top. I'm just going to color over it to cover that scan. Do the same thing over here. That looks pretty good. Now I'm going to merge it altogether. So I held down shift and with this layer was selected first and I held shift and clicked it and clicked the bottom one to select all of them. I'm going to right-click and hit merge layers. Now I can go ahead and use my crop tool again to crop back down to the document bounds. I'm actually going to use my Marquee Tool to cut out this little extra edge that's down there and crop it down. Now I'm ready to save this as a jpg. I'm going to move this to my class project folder. I can find it, go past project. This is going to be scan 7. I'll save it. We're all good to go. Let's finally put this thing together. So I have all my scans open because I'm not sure what I'm going to use yet. In fact, I want to let you know that normally, I think it's common for teachers including myself to work out a project before we show you working out a project. Because we don't want to look stupid and we don't know what's going to happen. We feel better if we know a little bit of where we're going and I get that and I think it's okay. But at the same time, I think it can be valuable for you to see what it's really like. I don't know what this bouquet is going to look like yet. I'm not sure. I don't know what shapes are going to work together. I don't know what colors I'm going to end up with. So I am going to show you just me putting the project together. The first thing I'm going to do is make a new document. Even if I weren't compiling things from a bunch of different scans, I like to make a fresh document because then I can control the resolution and I know everything's going to be set. I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to do random 18 by 18 inches at 600 resolution because that's what our scans are and I'm going to open that up. Now I'm just going to start looking through the scans to see what I want. Now one thing as I look through these, I can see that while my new Scanner did an amazing job, these images are a little bit hazy, but that's okay because we know that we have the tools that we need to adjust them. So I'm going to go ahead and I always start out with levels. I'm just going to increase some contrast to this. So you can see, let me pull that back out. So you can see that my histogram, it's picking up on all the white, but nothing is registering at full black. So I'm going to bring this up. I'm not going to bring it all the way to here because I don't want that much contrast, but I am going to bring it up. All ready that helps cut back on some of that haziness. Then when I increase the brightness of this white a little bit, and that looks pretty good. Now the thing is I am going to be cutting, and pasting from this document to my new one. Right now if I were to just go to this layer and cut these out, it's not going to bring the adjustment layer with it. It's just going to be these pixels. So while normally we want to work non-destructively, in this case, I know that I want to apply this change to this image. This is how I want to use these. So I'm going to go ahead and right-click on this and say merge visible or merge down. Either one in this case is going to result in the same thing. Now when I copy and paste and bring things over into the new document, they already have a little bit of an adjustment to them. So what I'm going to do is I think I'm going to use a lot of these flowers. So I want to start removing the background. For the most part that's going to be easy. But what I can see is around here, I'm going to have to be careful. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use my Lasso tool to trace over this, to protect the pixels that I want to keep. I'm not getting it perfectly. That's okay. I'm getting pretty close. So there's one, any area that I think the Magic Eraser tool is going to have a hard time with I want to protect. I'm going to hold down shift to add to my selection because I also want to select this guy. I'm going to do a less careful job because I'll go in and do a custom clean up later. I accidentally cut off some here. I'm going to add to that, I was on the subtract from going to add that back in. Then right here too. Then everywhere else maybe I'll protect here. Could have a hard time with that lightness. I think we will be good everywhere else. So basically I used that selection to protect those. I'm going to inverse that selection because I want the Magic Eraser tool to pay attention to everything except these areas. Paying shift E, tolerance is at 50. I'm going to bring that down to 35 first. I'm actually going to put a solid color, behind my stuff so that I can see how the erase did. It looks pretty good. I don't see anything. We lost some along here. I'm going to go back in. I'm going to hit Undo so that I can get my selection back. Then just add over here at this guy. I'm in my inversed selection, so I don't need to add to the selection. I actually need to subtract from it because we don't want this to be part of it. Let's try that again. Cool, that looks good. I'll still have some cleanup to do, but I at least have the basic, it's nice to just get some of it out of the way. So sometimes, I lost some in there. I'm going to have to go back. Sometimes it's hard to see where this when you get into tight areas, it can be hard to put the icon on the right spot. If you turn on your caps lock, that will actually give you cross hairs. So you can more accurately see where that is going to go. I'm not going to delete those, but I'm going to delete these. Since I'm working heavily in Photoshop and have a lot of files open. The fan on my computer is about to start roaring up again. Unfortunately that's what is getting picked up in the microphone. That's why it sometimes sounds static because my computer starts overheating. So that was good except I need to undo to protect this tool of down here. 13. Putting it Together Pt 2: Now with this, I want to try and just, I don't know if my magic want to now it's too light. I'm just going to use my regular lasso tool to trace around this. Because it's so light in value, and I really want to just make sure it's nice and clean. Cut that out. Again, whenever I just cut out pixels, I'm working destructively. But the point isn't that you always have to work non-destructively. It's very helpful so that you can go back if you make mistakes. But if you know, like I know I'm not going to want those pixels back. I don't I'm not worried about cutting them out. But anytime you are or you're fearful, you'll need to go back. It makes sense to work non-destructively. This look good. I'm just going to continue on down the line. I think I'm going to use this mug. I really like this. I knew that when I painted it, that I liked it. I'm going to actually just close the other scans that have mugs on them for now. This one, I'm going to do the same thing as before. I'm going to go ahead and apply some levels, which is going to increase this a little bit, and I think that is all this one needs. Maybe I'll bring the whites up just the touch. There's that difference. And again, I'm going to go ahead and merge this down because I'm not worried about working destructively, and this is the only guy care about, so I'm going to Shift, Command I, and get rid of that stuff. It's important you see each time I'm do I have a new thing, I have to unlock this as a background layer. If I keep this as a background layer and I cut this stuff out, I'm going to still have stuff back there because it's going to fill that background with whatever my background face. I want to make sure that I just change that to a regular layer so I have transparency around it. Grabbed my Magic Eraser, and that looks pretty good, and I'm just going to click and drag this layer to bring it to my working area. I made my work area too big, bring that down. I'm going to close this scan now. Don't need to save it because my adjustments, if I had to make those again and be okay. These are the easier gouache flowers that I provided because they're flatter. There's just single colors going on. These are going to be your most basic, easiest to select. These are going to be your more complex watercolors because we have a lot of shapes in here and we have lots of white showing through. These are step-up of gouache though, because they have some extra colors in there. But still these are going to be overall easier than watercolor because the areas of paint or flatter. These are advanced watercolors. As you can see, we have lots of values and colors in there. I'm going to go ahead and start with this pretty excusing my basic lasso tool to draw around and hit Command C, Command V. To change the scale like this, I'm hitting Command T. Command T opens up your basic transform where you can scale, rotate. If I right-click, I can flip things horizontally and vertically. Command T is a really important one to hold onto. If you need to rotate something evenly, you can hold down Shift and it'll go in, I think little 15 degree increments, just nice, and then I'm arranging my layers by hitting Command or Control left and right brackets. If I hit Command left bracket, it moves the layer down. If hit right bracket and moves it up. That's a nice quick way for me to do that. It used to be in Photoshop that you had to hold down Shift in order to keep the proportions locked, but they just updated it. Now it automatically does that. I'm just holding down option and dragging from a corner so that it'll scale from the center. Instead of if I let go, you'll see it drags from a corner. If you have an older version of Photoshop, then you might have to hold Shift in order to get an even tougher it to lock the proportions. It looks good to me. Right now I'm not going to get concerned about mistakes. Eventually, I wanted have that leaf not coming out and I'm not going to start adjusting color right now. Right now, I have an eye out for composition and what flowers I want to use. I want to use some of these, so I'm going to need to adjust them. Instead of making an adjustment layer right on top of this that I merged down, I'm actually just going to go ahead and apply the adjustment rate to the layer. If instead of going to Adjustment Layer levels, if I just hit Command or Control L, I'm going to get the same levels dialog box, but you'll notice it's not a separate layer, it's just going to apply it right here, so it's destructive, but cuts out of step for me, looks good. There's the before and after and just what a difference that makes with that Levels Adjustment. With gouache, it's nice, I usually don't have to worry with the Magic Eraser tool. It's because everything is such a hard edge. It does a pretty good job of getting in there. I'm just going to go ahead and grab. I really like this guy. Usually it's easier to go from bigger to smaller. I at least try to get the big guys that are the focal points in there so that they are arranged and then move things around. Like this leaf for me is this one can add Command L, bring up my layers, I love this. The nice thing with getting the background out is it just makes selecting the steps super easy. I'm just using my basic Lasso Tool. Do you see how bumpy this is? It's probably how I painted it, but I want to smooth that out. I'm just going to use the pen tool really quickly to cut out those pixels. Again, if I wasn't sure about this adjustment, I'd want to make a mask first, but I know I want to get rid of those, so I'm just going to command X to drop those. Think I need that other yellow one somewhere down here. Otherwise, it just, the eye goes there and then it doesn't know what to do. When you're in transform mode, so when I have this bounding box, some things are unavailable, I can't readjust the layers. I know I just did, but that's because it extended transform mode. But some things are going to be unavailable to you while you're in there. Once you're done transforming, just hit "Enter" and then everything will go back to normal. I'm going to shift click to select all my layers and then Command click on my mug because I don't want to move that. I'm just going to center these little better. I think that's a composition I can work with right now. This rose looks too big. There we go. Now my composition is done, but my colors are not quite there, and I could continue to add, honestly, I could sit here all day. There's so many fun shapes and different flowers and different styles that I really could go at this all day, but I want to move things along to show you. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a solid color from my background. I think I'm just going to go with a neutral background for this. I find that although I showed you an example earlier where I did watercolors on a dark background, and some artists are great with watercolor on dark background, for me, it just never quite work. If I, anytime that I have watercolor that's showing a lot of the white of the paper, I usually like to have a lighter, neutral background. But you can see that if I wanted to, I could change it to some other color and my selections are at least nice and neat in there for the most part. When I go back to this neutral, close to white, maybe I'll change it later. I'm just going to start with what stands out to me most. One of the first things that stands out is these leaves back here are pretty dark and they need to be cleaned up. I'm just going to use my Lasso Tool. I will say I probably use my Lasso Tool more than most people. One of my superpowers is being able to use the trackpad on my laptop really easily. That's what I've been using this whole time. I'm actually quicker with my trackpad than I am with a mouse and tablet. If you start using any key and you can't and you don't like the lasso tool that much, I don't blame you. It's just one of those weird things that I happen to be good at. Let's start actually making some adjustments. I want to make a local adjustment to these leaves only, and so I'm going to command click on them to select them. Then I'm going to go to my Adjustment Layer and hit "Hue saturation". By selecting it first, it automatically makes a Layer Mask, and so I know that these are going to be a local adjustment. Again, like we talked about earlier. Instead of doing that, without having this selected, could've just gone in here and done hue saturation and then done a clipping mask. They are essentially the same thing. This is part of the process, is just figuring out, what color do I want this to be and what's going to work best. I think I want it to be more green. I'm going to hit Colorized and see if I can get a better. Yes, I want a more yellow, green. If I turn off that adjustment layer, you can see that makes a big difference. 14. Putting it Together Pt 3: I don't love the shape of the angle of this head of this flower. The flower in the stem are all on one layer and I'm going to use my lasso tool just to get in there and select only the head. I don't have to worry about all this other stuff because those are on separate layers. I'm only paying attention to what's on this layer. Now I can actually, while this is selected, hit command T and I can transform this, move it around separately from the other stuff on the layer. Then I can hit Enter when I'm done. Only thing is I accidentally cut off the tip of the leaf and was editing that too so I do want to be a little bit more careful. Go back in here. Grab this, this time I want to be careful to not grab that leaf. I'll do the same thing. I'm looking at the overall composition to see when the shape is gonna make sense, I hit Enter and de-select. Move this guy back out. Now that size looks good, but I don't love this color pink. I'm going to select that again. Actually, I want to make a local adjustment just to this part of the flower. Go down here to hue saturation. Do you see how when I change this, I'm getting a weird halo. I don't know if it's gonna come through on the screen. I'm getting a strange halo here. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to delete this layer mask and I am going to make a clipping mask. I'm sorry, no, let me step back. I'm going to fill this layer mask back in with white. I'm going to create a clipping mask, and then I'm just going to mask out the area of the stem so that it doesn't affect the stem. So I'm going to paint with black. I got some of that flower going to paint with white, go back to black. I can switch my foreground and background colors by hitting X on my keyboard. That's why I'm doing that. Okay, and now I want to go back in. I'm going to reset this hue saturation so doesn't look so crazy. Now I at least know I'm affecting the correct part of my flower. I don't want to do a huge adjustment. I just don't want the pink to be as pink. I want it to be a little hotter. That's good. When I did that, I lost a little bit of the contrast. So I just want to make sure I bring some of that back and with levels. Now the cool thing is I don't only want my new color adjustment, I want some of this pink to show through. I'm actually going to come down to this layer mask that's affecting that color change and I'm going to get a different brush. I'll just use one of these squash ones. I'm going to go in and I'm just going to paint in some of the areas where I want that hotter or cooler paint to come through rather. Now if I toggle on that adjustment layer, you can see that I was able to just slightly adjust some of those colors and I'm still able to use the beautiful pink that I painted with, but now some of this warm or red helps tie in to the rest of the bouquet. Now this guy looks a little too big. I am going to scale that down. Move it here. Right now the colors match the mug too match. I want to adjust the low light here. I'm going to use my magic wand tool while on this layer to just select these dark areas and I didn't have contiguous checked, so it automatically grabbed all of them. Now I'm going to grab a hue and saturation layer. Orange is pretty. I like that, stark pink. Don't only switch the hue. Remember you have saturation, which is going to change that too. If I wanted to do more of a neutral, I could go that route. Think kind of late to that, going orange though. I think that's pretty. The only thing is when I do that I'm losing some contrast. Saturation up. There we go. That's better. Actually let me give this another layer levels adjustment too, just to increase contrast. Now if I put these, since these aren't clipping masks, they just have masks that are applying them, I'm going to put them in a group just so that I can toggle them on and off at the same time. You can see that is the shift that we just made. Going to ungroup those by hitting shift command G and keep moving on my way. Next, are these leaves back here. With your move tool, you can have it on an auto select layer or group or not. I usually don't have it on, but then sometimes it's when I know that I just have one thing on a layer, it's nice to just be able to unclick that layer, but be mindful of that because this can be annoying if you don't have the correct one on. Now I have that layer selected and I'm going to command click to select it. I'm going to give it a hue saturation. We're going to do colorized for this one because it's basically one tone already and that's going to give me better editing capabilities like this as more of a yellow gold. Except for now we have so much lightness in here. I think I might need to bring down the darkness of these flowers that we originally did. Anytime you need to get back into an adjustment layer, you just click on the icon and it's going to bring this back up. Let's see what I can do. Remember the only reason I'm using the lightness slider right now is because I'm in colorize, which won't give me too many weird effects that I warned against earlier. That's nice. It's better. I think I'm struggling in the middle here because if I put too much in here, then it's going to look messy because of all these leaves but it also doesn't quite look full enough right now so I'm going to look for another flower or another leaf to throw in there. Maybe just this tool up is what I need. When I'm going back and forth as I'm re-envisioning the space and as I look at a shape, I'm trying to determine if I think it would be a good fit there. I think I'm going to move these guys up a little bit like that. I think I'm going to try this tool up. That's cute. This leaf is a little intrusive though, I'm going to go ahead and make a mask on this layer, and I'm going to brush that leaf out. Now what's standing out to me is this yellow is too bright, so I'm going to go ahead, grab the magic wand tool and make a local hue saturation adjustment. I would say with watercolor, I use hue saturation adjustments more, when I'm using wash, I can usually use brushes are just paint right over it to get what I want. With watercolor, I get a more natural effective if I affect the hue saturation. Now I want to affect this one the exact same as this one. I'm actually going to make a copy of this adjustment layer by hitting command J. Then I'm going to delete this layer mask that's on it because that's just that specifically shaped for here. I'm going to go put this above the other yellow ball and right now it's affecting everything beneath the layer and I just want it to affect here, so I'm going to go ahead and hold down option to make a clipping mask, and now you can see that's just a local adjustment there. We're looking pretty good. I think the last thing that I want to do is slightly adjust the color of this leaf right here it looks a little faded and it looks a little too blue-green. I'm going to command "Click" to select the whole thing. But then I'm going to use my lasso tool to subtract the head of this flower from that selection. Because I only want the leaves so now only the leaves are selected and I can go ahead and go in and do a hue saturation. Yeah, that's better. Cool that's it. I do want to open up, to show you because in one of the scans, let's see, I did black. This one, this stuff, so I want to show you how I can use Quick Mask Mode to add some of this stuff in so I'm going to bring this scan in, and right away I am going to open up my Levels Adjustment. Looks good. Again, I didn't do a separate layer because I just wanted to apply it right to it, I'm going to hit this button and now if you wanted to use any of these as decoration, like let's see, I have a lot going on already, but I'll do a few black. Some of these black eyes shooting out of the bouquet. I'm going to hit "Command C" and I'm going to use my Quick Mask Mode to bring these ends. I'm going to make a new layer, hit "Q", going to Paste, hit "Q" again, inverse the selection, fill the selection, deselect. These can either be a little standalone shoots that come out or they can act as lines on these leaves. Bring that down. I chose among that already had a design painted on it. But the reason I did these as so that you can take one of these blank mugs and you could make a pattern out of these hearts or you could put dots on it, You could use these stripes. In fact, if I wanted to swap out this mug, this is the great thing about working digitally. I could grab a totally different mug. Grab this cute pink one, and I pasted it in here with its background. That's okay, I'm just going to magic erase that away. Cute. Then if I wanted, I could come in and grab this heart. I'm going to do Quick Mask Mode again. Looks like I've picked up some extra pixels that I didn't mean to, I'm going to use my regular eraser tool just to erase The funkiness. Now I'm going to go ahead and lock the transparent pixels, and filled out with red and now we have a totally different mug. I know it's funny that it took a million years just to get to this point, but I hope you can see that it's important to understand the tools and then once you get what they all do, you can just go to work and digitize this endlessly. I could digitize it this way and then decide that I want to fill 12 other mugs and then make a pattern out of it if I wanted. I could group these together and start playing with different background colors. If I thought maybe I wanted to try out a colored ground and I see that, this green actually looks pretty cute. Without too much trouble, you were able to take these painted elements, totally changed them and recolor them. In fact, let's do a fun before and after. I just duplicated this group that had everything in it by hitting "Command J". I'm going to turn off the top one and I'm going to go in here and I'm actually going to delete any of these adjustment layers that we put in so that we can see what things looked like before. Of course, we had adjusted these a little bit before, we brought them in so it's not going to be the hugest difference, but this is what we were working with before and this is what we have after. You can see that just with like a few shifts, we really take this thing from; not that this is bad, this isn't bad, It just isn't great; it just doesn't sing. Whereas once we are able to get in there and move things around how we want them, then it starts to sing. 15. Delivery: Now that I have finished my composition, I want to show you how I would clean this up to deliver to a client. I'm going to go ahead and ungroup this layer that I had before. The first thing you can see is that I wasn't really concerned about organizing my layers as I was going. I didn't name anything, I didn't group many things. So the first thing I want to do is go through and clean that up. I'm going to go through and name my layers. I'm going to delete this black line, I wanted to show you as an example, but it doesn't really do anything for the illustration. Now everything has been named. I want to say that I usually save a working file for myself and then I save a separate delivery file. I'm just going to go ahead and save this. This would be called, painted floral bouquet and I'd put it in a folder and all of that stuff, so I'm going to save it. But then when, lets say that a client wanted to license this and it's time to deliver to them, what I'm going to do is I'm going to save a copy, and I'm going to append the name to say delivery at the end, because then I know that this is my delivery file. Basically what I'm going to go through and do is organize, and merge things so that less of this stuff is editable. You always want to give clients things that are on separate layers because they need to be able to edit that. But at the same time, I don't necessarily want to give them all of these adjustment layers because I don't want them to go in and see, oh, this was originally bright yellow. Well, we like that better, and we're going to change that. I've already made the decision as the artist that this is the color that I want it to be. I want to give that to them as already that color. Really quickly, I notice with this new mug, these leaves are poking out down here, and so I'm just going to put a layer mask on that and paint that out. You can use a regular brush. Is there something else that's sticking out? It's here. I'm going to go through and my mug and heart, they go together, so I'm going to group those and call them mug. We ended up not using this mug, so I'm going to just delete that out of there. Now for this, this is the adjustment layer that's making this yellow. I'm going to go ahead and accept that, and merge those together. Now when the client gets it, it's still a separate layer that they can edit, but the color is already baked into it. With this Toolip, I had applied a layer mask to hide that leaf. There are some times that I'll leave some of these in there for clients because they might want to change it. In this case, I'm happy with the composition. I don't think that they need to go in and alter that. So I'm going to actually apply the layer mask, which is going to be destructive, it's going to throw away these pixels. I'm going to right click, say Apply Layer Mask. Now that's just what that layer is. Then this flower has three adjustment layers. I want to make sure I merge all of those together. This one has two, merge those together. You can see it's going to sometimes change the layer name. I want to change this back to orange rose, pink rose, merge these, yellow bud, merge these. This can be an intensive process if you've got a lot of layers, but once you get going, it's not that bad. Background leaves. Now I have everything nicely organized. I'm going to go ahead and group all of these flowers together and call it flowers. I'm going to call this background fill, and I'm going to delete this empty layer that's back here. Now when I deliver this file to the client, they have everything nice and organized. It's still editable in the way that they need it, but it's not our working file that we will keep for ourselves. The last thing I want to talk about in terms of delivery is worrying about indexing color. If you are working with a client who needs to have an exact amount or limited amount of colors, then giving them a file like this can be difficult because there's a ton of colors in here. We have tons of different, I mean, just in this leaf alone, we probably have 36 different colors. When you're working with painted media, a nice way to reduce those colors is to index your color. I want to tell you right off the bat, that I'm showing you this because I get requests for it all the time. The reason I haven't shown it before is because, I honestly only know a little bit of what I'm doing in there and I don't like to teach things that I don't actually understand. But you've asked about it so much that I just want to show you what I do. Even if I can't explain all of it that way, I can at least show you what I know. The first thing I want to do when I'm indexing is I want to save as, because when we index we flatten everything. I want to make sure that I have a new file that I'm indexing, so that I don't accidentally ruin anything. To switch over to index mode, we're going to go up to Image, and Mode, and Indexed Color. Now, when you switch to indexed color, it's like every time you click on this, Photoshop is re-calculating. That's going to make sense in a second, but I just wanted to say that. I'm going to switch over to indexed color. It's going to ask if I want to merge the layers, and I'm going to say ''Okay''. Now this is our indexed color box. There's all of these different ways that I can choose how to pick out colors. I usually stick in this local perceptual, selective, and adaptive area. When I was trying to learn how to index color and I was googling, I somehow found somebody had taken notes from a class that they were in that taught them how to index color. They took those notes, and they put them online and I found them somehow. I'll give those as a class resource, so that you can see because there's a nice little description of how these differ. I can't remember off the top of my head and I didn't want to read her notes and then tell you that as if I knew, because I didn't. Usually local adaptive is pretty good. I'll do local adaptive, or local selective usually. Local adaptive, this is where I can choose how many colors. Right now it has already indexed this down to 30 colors, and it looks pretty good. You can see if I change this to a 100, is it giving me a 100 colors? There we go. If boost that up to a 100, then you can see that it's giving me some more backend. If I go to the other extreme and change this to 10, and then I'm tabbing, and tabbing, so that it'll recalculate. You can see that this is it, brought down to to colors. It actually doesn't look terrible. It looks fine. We are all getting some flatness and a little bit of weirdness here in the leaf. But considering that we just took a watercolor painting and got it down to 10 colors and it still looks like this, is pretty great. I usually like to start somewhere in the middle where I'm still getting a lot of colors that I want, but I'm not dealing with a 100 colors, this is going to be too much. Dealing with 30 colors is actually going to be a lot. Let's see if I can get it away with 18. You can also uncheck and recheck this Preview button if you can't remember what it looked like before. Let's see 25. I'm going to go with 25 and I'm going to hit, before I hit ''Okay'', let's talk about what's happening down here. Anytime you have a blend happening between colors, that is what this dither is trying to figure out. How do you want us to move from color to color? Because remember, we don't have 47 colors that we can fade to in here. Now we're only dealing with 25 colors. Right now you can see I have Diffusion selected, I'm getting this dot pattern. I can go to Pattern, and it's just going to take a second. You can see I'm getting even more of a pixelated pattern. Then I can go to Noise. I believe it's the pattern observer blog, they have an article about indexing color and they actually talk about what the differences of these dithers are. I almost always keep mine on diffusion. There are few times when pattern or noise is better, and then you can change this amount. If I turn this down to 20 percent from 80 percent, we can see that now I'm getting less of a crazy speckle, and I'm getting a more natural texture. That's only if I zoom in really, really close. I'm going to hit ''Okay''. Now our piece is officially indexed. Now when I did that, something super weird happened to the background. I've never seen that before. I can hit Command Z to totally undo, but that's going to send me back from indexed to RGB mode. I can just go back in here and open this backup. Sorry, no, I can't. That's the whole thing. I can either Command Z. So I went back, and so now this is, you can see it's no longer flattened. I have to redo all of that work again, or I'm going to step forward, so it's going to be re-indexed again. No it's, here we go, Redo, Indexed, Color, there we go. Now I'm back in this indexed mode, and what I could do, is I could go from indexed to RGB, and you can see that that fixes it. Then I can go back to indexed color. Earlier when I was talking about how this recalculates, this is now actually going to remember the reduced colors that we had before. Now when I go in here, it's actually going to go back to my exact 25. It remembers all of that, and had I combined any of those colors, which I'll show you in a second. Anyway, so I can hit ''Okay'' again and see if that fixes it. It's not, I can't really, I've never seen that before, and you know what it was? It's just artifacting. If I zoom in, I'm only at 60 percent and it went away, and at 100 percent it's not there. So this is just a visual effect that's happening because I'm zoomed out so far, so I'm not going to worry about that. Anyway, back to what I was saying. I'm going to go to Image, Mode and Color Table. This is where we can actually see the colors that are now making up this piece, and this is where I can alter them. If I found that this darkest green was actually not dark enough, I could go ahead and bump that down and it'll actually change it in all the places that that color is there. This is where if you're needing to put a very specific color in here, you can index it down and then I can actually pick the exact color that I want. That's why indexing is so great. It does mean, of course again that we have lost, I can't go in here and move the composition around, because it's already been indexed. But if I wanted to do that, I could go back to Image, Mode, and RGB. Even though everything is on a flattened layer, if I really needed to, I could still go back in here, rotate this a little bit, de-select, fill in this area behind there with the background color. It does not look like the background color. Anyway, fill it with the background color. There we go. I could now go back into indexed color. Again, it's going to recalculate, to merge those layers. Now you can see I'm back to the same 25 colors I was using, but I was able to alter my piece. That is indexing color. Once you save it, it's going to be in this indexed mode. If you deliver this file to someone, it's going to be indexed and they can't go in and alter it, and all of your colors will be reduced. Obviously, the one thing about the color table here is when you are working with, let me go back to indexed color, that's fine. If I'm working with watercolors and indexed then obviously I can't really go in here and grab, let's see what's the color that's fading with other stuff, like this pink, I'm not going to be able to go in and change it drastically to a green because, remember that's just too big of a shift and it's going to look weird. You want to have your colors mostly adjusted before you bring them into index because indexing is such a finalizing process. That's how I index my color. 16. BONUS: Making Repeat Patterns: Before I send you on your way to digitize all the paint, I just wanted to give you a look into how I make patterns in Photoshop. This is not a beginner-friendly pattern tutorial. If you have not made a pattern before, if this is your very first time opening Photoshop, this is not the tutorial for you. Let me just continue to repeat that. I will not be doing my usual Dylan [inaudible] thing of explaining in-depth every little thing I'm doing. This video is just for the people who have asked me countless times how I make patterns in Photoshop just so that I can show a rough idea of my rundown. So the first thing you need to know is when you're defining patterns in Photoshop, you can either do it to the canvas bounds, or to a selection. So right now if I go and hit edit, and define pattern. I'm going to hit okay. I'm going to open up a new document, and I usually size mine when I'm testing my patterns, I do it 20" by 29" at 300 DPI because this is the size of wrapping sheets that I sometimes order and it's a size that I can really visualize in my mind, and so it just helps me know that things are big enough and how the scale is going to look. I'm going to go down to this adjustment layer and I'm going to add pattern, and it's automatically going to fill in our area with this pattern fill. I'm going to turn the scale of it down to 70 percent so that I can see more of it in here and you can see that sure enough, it made a pattern of our tile. Now, I haven't completed my tile. You can see I need to repeat all of the things on the edges, which I'll show you in a second. But I just wanted to show you that that is how you set a pattern. This whole area would be my tile, I'll go to Edit and Define pattern. Now, if you don't like that, there are some times, I'm going to go ahead and turn my guides on, which is Command or Control colon. You can also go to View and Show Guides, right here. So you can also set it to a selection. Sometimes I don't like that I can't see the stuff hanging off, I'm used to Illustrator when I have this extra art board. So sometimes when I'm working, I'll actually be working on a canvas that is bigger than my tile. I'll be working in a bigger area, but I will have my tile laid out with guides so that when I'm ready to define my pattern, I can actually just go in and grab my Marquee tool. It's going to automatically snap to these guides, and now I can go to Edit and Define Pattern. Hit Okay. And you can see that if I double-click this and change it to the newest pattern we just made, I don't notice any difference. You can do that either way. When I deliver a patterned tile to a client, I always crop it down. I don't expect them to know. Not that they're dumb or anything, but it's just more customary that they know that they are getting the actual tile and not a tile with extra stuff hanging off. So as you know, when we make a pattern tile, whatever hangs off one side needs to come over on the other. The way that I navigate that in Photoshop is by using Transform and doing a little bit of math. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use my Marquee tool to drag out, to figure out what these dimensions are. And right now you can see with my rulers on, which I got those by hitting "Command or Control R." I'm in inches, I actually want to right-click and go to pixels, and with the selection open, I want to open up my Info Panel over here. If you don't have that, you can go to Window and Info. And I want to look at this width and height, and I actually want to jot that down. So on a piece of paper, I'm going to go ahead and write down. I'm going to write down that my width or my x-value is 5316, and my height, or what will be my y-value is 4944. And so basically, what we're going to do is I'm going to copy all of the things that hang off the edge, and I'm going to transform them to be in the right spot on the other side. I'm going to go to Auto-select and group because all of these motifs are separate groups. And I'm going to start with this guy right here that needs to move to the left. I've got them selected, I know I've got the right one. I'm going to go ahead and hit Command or Control J to duplicate, and I'm going to hit Command T to transform. I'm going to use the calculator on my cell phone. This is the only bummer between Photoshop and Illustrator. In Illustrator, you can actually type math into these areas and it'll do the math for you. In Photoshop it won't, you have to enter the exact value. So since I'm moving this to the left, I need to look at the x-value and so I'm going to enter 7014.5 into my calculator, and then I'm going to subtract the number that I wrote down for my width value when we took down the information of the tile size. I'm going to subtract 5316 on my phone and I get the results of 1698.5. And what that is, is that's my new x-value. I'm going to type 1698.5 and hit Enter. Now I know that that is in the exact right spot. And if I want to test it, I can grab my Marquee tool, select my tile, go to Edit, Define Pattern. Okay. And I can see that yes, this flower is correctly tiling over that edge and I don't have any issues. I would keep going until everything is covering the other edge, so I'm going to go ahead and do that. You can see when I copy this one that the stacking order, it's supposed to be behind that. I'm actually just going to go ahead and move that around so that it's behind those. Now, this one popped up in front of that one, so I'm going to move him. So just pay attention to that stuff, when you're moving everything around, that you're not throwing off the layout. When I get to the corners, so this item down here is covering a corner, so it's going to have to go in all four places. I like to move one, so this one I'm going to move to the left. I'm going to take that x-value of 6540 and I'm going to subtract 5316 and get 1224. And now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to group both of those together. You can see they're on one layer, duplicate them together, and now I can move them to the top corner at one time. So this time, since I moving up, I need the y-value. I'm going to take 5690.5, and I'm going to subtract the y-value of 4944, and that gives me 746.5. And now those corner areas are popped right in there. I would keep going until the whole tile was done, but I just want to show you how I then test that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select my area, but I'm actually going to turn off any background so that it's just these motifs here. I want to go to Edit, Define Pattern, okay. And this time, I'm actually going to put a color fill in here myself, and then I'm going to put the pattern on top. Sometimes I'll do this just so that I can test to make sure that the background isn't showing through where it shouldn't be. Here are obviously those motifs that I didn't move, but I want to travel up this way to make sure that I'm not seeing any gaps and I'm not. I can see a stacking order issue there, I'll need to fix that, but that's just a nice way to go in to test to make sure that everything is working. And it's nice to see that the areas that I've moved that stuff, it looks like it's flowing well. So that is how you can do a traditional tile within Photoshop. The next thing I want to show you though, is a lot of the time what I like to make in Photoshop is a half drop repeat or an overlapping half drop. And so what I would do is I'm going to go ahead and select both of these and right-click and convert it to a smart object. I know we didn't talk about smart objects in this class, but essentially, what it does is it removes this artworks so that right now I'm just dealing with one layer. I don't have to worry about those groups getting separated. But if I want to edit this later, I can just double-click on this mug and it's going to take me to the separate file, where everything is still alive. I can make any changes if I need to, hit save, close this, and then it will update over here. And the reason I do that is because if I were to, I'm about to make a bunch of copies of this, and if I were to make copies of that one group that had everything in it, then for one thing, my Photoshop file is going to get huge because all of those layers are just getting duplicated and duplicated and duplicated. And also, if after I title this thing, I realized that I want to make a change and I actually want the mug to be blue, by working with a smart object, I can update this in one place, and then all of the smart object copies will be updated. You'll see what I mean in a second. I like to start there and I'm going to go ahead and just make my tile bigger, I like to have a really big area to work in. Whenever I'm making a half drop, I usually start, I like to test just to see if it's even going to work as a half drop, or if it's going to look stupid, and so I'm just going to start playing around with first doing a horizontal overlap. I'm looking at where this is overlapping up here to try to get it close, but I'm not worried too much about my accuracy. Sometimes when I first get in here, I just need to see like is generally going to work. I'm changing the stacking order so that the mug is behind that flower. You can see I'd probably want to fix this so this leaf isn't in front of this guy. But generally, this could be a really cute half drop, and so I'll show you how I would do that. I'm going to go ahead and delete all those I've tested to see that generally, yes, this is going to work as a repeat, and now we are ready to go. The first thing I want to do is make a copy by hitting Command J, and I'm going to move this into place where I want it. Now, really quickly, do you see this little stem that's sticking out? I want to fix that. So I'm going to double-click on here, open up my flowers. I have a feeling it's those tall flowers that are, yep. I'm just going to erase that. Hit Save. Close out of this and you can see that that updated the smart object right away. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a copy by hitting Command J, and I'm going to move this up. I'm going to start with that as my overlap, I think that's going to work and basically I want to make sure that I'm overlapping the same amount on top as I am on the bottom. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to select my first layer and I'm going to hit "Command T" and what this is going to allow me to do is if I hold down Command and drag from my rulers, I'm going to be able to set up a guide that snaps right to the edge of this. I'm going to just make sure that I have guides that tell me how big the dimensions of this layer are. I'm going to hit "Enter" and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the second mug, hit transform and I basically just want to see how much these are overlapping, I want to catch the bottom of this. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure and make a little marker for how much this is overlapping. I'm going to grab my Marquee tool. I'm going to grab the height of this. I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to fill it with any color because it's just a reference and I'm going to call this vertical overlap. Now I want to use this ruler to make sure that this next copy I put down here is overlapping the same amount. What I'm going to do is I'm going to move this down so that it is flushed with the bottom of this layer because remember we want an overlap, so the bottom of this is going to touch here and then this next layer at the top of it is going to hit right here. I'm going to hit "Command T" to transform this just so that I can bring a guide by holding down Command or Control right there, and this line is now going to dictate where this copy should come down to. I'm just going to make another copy of this by hitting "Command J". I'm going to hit "Command T", and I'm going to click and drag while holding Shift to bring it straight down until it snaps right onto where that guide is. If I hide my guides by hitting Command or Control colon and I turn off my ruler, you can see that now these things are equally overlapping. The only thing is on this one, the leaves are behind the mug and on this one it's in front of it. I like it in front, so I'm just going to make sure that my stacking order is correct so that that happens in both places. Now my vertical overlap is good. Now if I accidentally delete a layer or I need to set it back up, I always have this, so I'm going to turn this off. Now we're going to do the same thing, but for our horizontal overlap, I'm going to grab these three and I'm going to group them, I'm going to duplicate that group, and I'm going to move it because now I already know that those are correctly spaced apart and now I can just focus on how much I want my vertical overlap to be. That looks pretty good. I can feel it snapping into where the true half drop is. A true half drop is literally equidistant halfway but I like to usually use that as a starting point and then, sometimes I'll choke in really close or sometimes I'll space it out. It's up to you but in this case it looks where the half drop is falling is pretty good, I might bring it down a little bit, and that looks pretty good to me. What I'm going to do is essentially the reverse of what we did before. I'm going to hit "Command T" on this group. I'm going to open up my guides and I'm going to go to View and clear Guides because now I just want a fresh set of Guides. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit "Command T", hold down Command and drag this out and then, I'm going to get the left side of this one so that I can see how much these are overlapping. I'll go ahead and use my Marquee tool to grab that and make a new layer and fill it. This is going to be called my horizontal overlap. I'm going to grab this first group because now I need to know where the left side is and then, I'll use my horizontal overlap to help me figure out where this other group of layers should go. So duplicate that, transform it, and move it over here until it snaps in place. Now if I go ahead and turn off my guides and I turn off my overlap, I am guaranteed that these things are overlapping in the correct spot. Now to just make a tile out of all of this, I can see that any half drop, you're going to find the center and then, you want to find motifs to the left of that and then, you just want to find where that motif repeats. This is going to help us figure out what our tile is. Basically I can see that these four corners of the hearts are going to be the corner of my tile. I'm going to turn on auto select layer, and I'm going to click on this mug and hit "Command T" and I'm just going to drag out guides that come to the center of this. Now my guides are turned off, so I need to turn them back on. When I do that, I can see I have a ton of them, so I'm just going to clear those out again, I'm going to do this again because this is the most important set of guides because this is laying out our tile. Now I can see that this tulip is the center where the tile corner is going to be, and last thing I need is down here, I'll find the center and I'm going to drag the guides to the center of that. Now even though we use the heart as our visual for where that tile was, we actually just use the exact centers of these layers to set the guides up to make sure that it is accurate. Now I can just see visually that where this mug is overlapping is aligned with where it's overlapping here. I can see all of that. Basically, everything looks like it's all set and to test that I can just go ahead and grab my Marquee tool, go up to edit, define pattern and I can go ahead and see how I did. Now this is a really big pattern so I want to turn this down to 40 percent. What I like to do is I just want to zoom in and I first want to go from left to right. I'm trying to see if I notice that I did anything wrong. From left to right, it looks like everything is repeating okay and then, I want to go from top to bottom. It looks like everything tiled all right on that first try. So now I can turn this back up to a 100 percent and now I have a cute half drop ready to go. That is how I make my patterns in Photoshop. Like I said earlier in the delivery video, if a client then licensed this and needed this artwork, then I would crop and grab my crop tool and I would crop down to the layer or to just where the tile is and this is what I would give them. Of course, after this is all cleaned up. Now, earlier, really quickly, what I was talking about with these smart objects is now if I double-click and go in here and I decide, "You know what? This purple really isn't working." I can go in, do my adjustment layer thing. I know it's just an example and it doesn't matter, but I don't want to pick a dim color. Let's say we needed that tulip to be blue. I've made that adjustment, I can hit save and once it's finished saving this down here you can see it's updating all of my smart objects. I can close this and now this pattern everywhere where that smart objective is, you can see it was updated. That's a really quick way to deal with changes. 17. Thank You!: Hey, thank you so much for spending some time chatting about the nerdier parts of Photoshop with me. I know it's a lot of information in a new way of thinking, but I promise you, I promise you from the part of my heart that remembers being a beginner, that the more you practice and find projects to complete, the more you'll get an actual feel for the program. These digital tools can feel just as natural and calming as your physical ones. For regular encouragement and inspiration, go ahead and give me a follow on Instagram. For updates on new classes, you can follow me here on Skillshare, and for those of you that want to not miss any of the important things, you can sign up for my quarterly newsletter on my website. Thank you so so much. I can't wait to see what you come up with.